13 replies to this topic

[jamiethemorris]

I found this link recently: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

It's a step-by step guide for installing mountain lion on an older model Mac Pro. What's strange is he's using Chameleon, complete with an smbios, boot.plist, etc... Which basically turns it into a semi-hackintosh. I was under the impression that installing Chameleon on a real mac would make it non-bootable. How does this work? Is it the fact that he's using --legacy when blessing the partition?

This is strictly out of curiosity as my Macbook Pro is 100% Mountain Lion compatible and I have absolutely no reason to do it.

[Kervich]

Old mac pro doesn't have 64-bit EFI required by ML to boot so Chamaleon is used to emulate that. Second, he' s using smbios.plist to change the platform-id to fool the ML installer, that would refuse to install the OS on Mac Pro 1,1.

[jamiethemorris]

Ok. I understand that, but I'm also wondering how it's bootable with chameleon. I thought it was only bootable on a PC.

[p.H]

 Kervich, on 12 November 2012 - 11:41 AM, said:

Old mac pro doesn't have 64-bit EFI required by ML to boot so Chamaleon is used to emulate that. Second, he' s using smbios.plist to change the platform-id to fool the ML installer, that would refuse to install the OS on Mac Pro 1,1.

I remember chameleon teams has ever announced that chameleon should NOT be installed on real macs. It's still a little bit curious how does the owner made it.

[jamiethemorris]

Yep. I'm thinking it has to be the --legacy thing... AFAIK that's what bootcamp uses for legacy bios compatibility

[meklort]

Macs still emulate standard pc bioses, this just uses that feature of the UEFI bios on the mac pro. The main reason why you wouldn't want to boot a mac with chameleon is because the apple efi drivers fro video and audio are not read, and as such the device tree is not populated with those. This means that you have to hope that GraphicsEnabler and other chameleon features do the right stuff to enable your hardware.

Basically, no, installing chameleon will not make the machine unbootable *if you do it correctly*, it may however make graphics not work.

[3.14r2]

As I see it (after reading the article), it goes as follows:
Native Mac EFI 32 boot > BIOS emulation mode > Cahmeleon EFI 64 emulation mode > OS boots up.

Bit complicated, but seems (in a way) similar to booting on non UEFI BIOS PCs, via Tianocore EFI. This is used to install and run Windows 7 64bit from GPT disk on PCs without UEFI (with just plane old BIOS).

[jamiethemorris]

Interesting.

[Frank Moolah]

This would benefit me if I had an older real 64-bit Mac.

[theconnactic]

Out of curiosity, is it possible/useful to use DSDT injection on Macs booting from native EFI?

[Gringo Vermelho]

Probably but the question is what could you possibly want to inject?

btw (to reiterate what the round one said) the MacPro1,1 has 32-bit EFI firmware, and therefore cannot run Mountain Lion.

You can get around this Apple-imposed limitation by installing Chameleon on it.

[theconnactic]

Nothing at all, Gringo: i asked out of intellectual curiosity. It would be unpractical and unnecessary, i suppose, since all EFI-capable peripherals would be properly and automatically recognized by the native EFI without any need of inject them

However, it just came to my mind as i'm writing this post: what about PC parts? Would they necessarily have be flashed with an EFI-compatible ROM to run properly or at all, or couldn't they just be dsdt-injected as is?

Best regards.

[Gringo Vermelho]

As far as I know, as long as there is a driver for OS X, PC PCI-E expansion cards work fine in a Mac.

I guess if something needs an EFI ROM/boot-ROM to work at all, DSDT injection by itself won't help?

[theconnactic]

Thank you, you're obviously right.