Fedora 18 on MacBook Pro

Sanne Grinovero sanne.grinovero at gmail.com
Sat Jan 12 13:30:46 UTC 2013


Hello all,

while I don't like OsX and have been "linux power user" for over many
years, I was offered a new MacBook pro 15" (non-retina) as an upgrade
for the old work laptop (edition summer 2012).
Using Fedora as main OS I immediately suspected this choice was not
ideal, but the build quality and hardware was tempting so I accepted
the offer, well aware I'd have to work a bit to get Fedora running on
it. Also very rarely I need to test some things on OsX so being able
to dual boot in it sounded like a good idea.

By following some guides I installed rEFIt and managed to install
Fedora 17 initially, but that was a disaster of workarounds needed to
apply as kernel parameters and never got it stable, so I ended up
installing beta1 of Fedora 18.. much better: after yum updating to the
latest kernel packages I noticed I don't even need dirty tricks such
as disabling apic: the system is stable for desktop usage.

There are still plenty of problems to solve for "on the road" usage:
- if I try to suspend it, it can't resume -> have to cold-restart it.
- booting up is extremely slow, rEFIt seems to search for a long time
before handing over to Grub
- when using out of the box parameters, the battery doesn't give you
much more than 30 minutes work time

All these combined make it damn hard to "quickly check something".


After using powertop I can get it to roughly 1,2 hours, better but
clearly something is wrong yet.
I'm suspecting the NVIDIA card: if I run lspci it reports a single VGA
device from NVIDIA; I'm pretty sure that this laptop has an intel one
as well and is supposed to activate NVidia only on demand.

I don't actually need dynamic switching, I'd like to disable the
Nvidia one and use the Intel one only; I'm not even sure what X is
using today: /var/log/Xorg.0.log mentions VESA .. looks strange to me
as Gnome3 is succesfully working with all effects.

My suspicion is that I'm not booting the system with EFI and the damn
thing is emulating the BIOS mode as it would do for Windows
installations (through Apple's bootcamp), this might explain why the
Intel device is "hidden"?

Looking at >top I can also see that gnome-shell is burning a hell of
CPU, is that how I'm having the full effects experience while running
on VESA? I see gnome-shell using around 50% of *each* of my CPUs.

In my experiments I also tried to use nuoveau or the Nvidia
proprietary drivers, to see if they could improve either CPU or
battery.

nouveau: it doesn't seem to load the modules.
NVidia: system locks up
booting from self-built kernel 3.8.0-rc2 (to try newer nouveau):
system boots, Gnome3 shows a useless error "something went wrong,
contact your sysadmin".. no clue so I abandoned this path (of course
this could have failed for other reasons).

As resuming from suspend also fails because the screen doesn't turn on
again, I hope all these problems are related.

Anyone has a clue please?

As I'm suspecting it's using the BIOS emulation (how to check??), I'd
like to try booting it as a "real EFI" OS but I have no clue of how
that would work, and couldn't find much literature on this subject, at
least not suitable for my level of skill.. any pointers appreciated,
especially to work with Fedora 18!

Thanks in advance,
Sanne


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