OS X dual boot criterion problems

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-12-28 at 18:39 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 12:41 AM, Adam Williamson <
> adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > Hi, folks. Talking to cmurf, our resident OS X dual boot expert, 
> > on #fedora-qa, it's become clear that when we adopted the OS X 
> > dual boot criterion a few weeks back, we didn't have a good 
> > understanding of the current state of that code and particularly 
> > upstream grub's support for booting OS X via UEFI. Basically it 
> > seems that booting OS X from grub didn't work then and doesn't 
> > work now and we can't realistically fix it, so we shouldn't have 
> > put that criterion in place because it's not something we can 
> > actually viably achieve.
> > 
> > cmurf, roshi, kparal and I voted +1 to removing the criterion on 
> > that basis. I'm hoping cmurf will be kind enough to look at the 
> > issue again for the F22 cycle, in consultation with pjones if 
> > necessary, so we can put a realistic requirement in place before 
> > we get into F22 Alphas.
> > 
> > If no-one has any objections, we'll make the removal formal ahead 
> > of tomorrow's Go/No-Go meeting for 21. Thanks folks!
> 
> Gist: EFI GRUB still gets these legacy OS X boot options that were 
> designed to permit CSM-BIOS GRUB to EFI boot OS X. They don't work 
> from EFI GRUB though.
> 
> As far as I can tell there's no upstream bandwidth/interest in 
> fixing this; even if it means just suppressing the creation of the 
> entries, rather than chainloading the Apple bootloader. So I think 
> the issue is not a QA issue right now, but needs to be bounced back 
> to desktop@ for the Workstation WG to maybe use some recruitment 
> influence if they want to see this fixed.
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2014-10/msg00044.html
> 
> A challenge with grub2-mkconfig creating an entry to chainload 
> Apple's boot.efi, is with recent on-disk format changes in OS X 
> 10.10 since this last October. It means os-prober will need to 
> become aware that the boot.efi it's looking for is now on an Apple 
> Boot [1] partition. I'm not sure what's involved in doing that work 
> compared to just suppressing the creation of entries that don't work 
> anyway.

Thanks for the info, and sorry for the belated reply.

So, where would you say we are WRT the criteria for F22 right now? 
What would be a reasonable expectation?

As of right now, we have these in the F22 Final criteria:

Windows dual boot

The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an 
existing clean Windows installation and install a bootloader which can 
boot into both Windows and Fedora.

OS X dual boot

The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an 
existing OS X installation, install and configure a bootloader that 
will boot Fedora; if the boot menu presents OS X entries, they must 
boot OS X. Installing Fedora must not inhibit the system's ability to 
boot OS X from the UEFI boot manager.

We do not have any Linux dual boot criterion.

Do we need to amend the OS X or Windows criteria to reflect technical 
reality in any way? Do we want to take another shot at adding a 
limited Linux dual/multi-boot criterion before we hit Alpha? If so we 
should revisit the F21-era proposals, agree on a wording, and run it 
by anaconda-devel-list ASAP.

Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net