Re: UEFI display frozen on Retina MacBook Pro

On Sep 8, 2014, at 7:21 AM, Anders Bolt Evensen <andersbo87_at_icloud.com> wrote:

> On 05.09.14 19:37, John Nielsen wrote:
>> On Sep 5, 2014, at 11:30 AM, Glen Barber <gjb_at_FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 11:20:21AM -0600, John Nielsen wrote:
>>>> I have a "MacBook Pro Retina, Mid 2012" (MacBookPro10,1) on which I'd like to be able to boot FreeBSD from an external USB drive. For testing I've been using the mini-memstick images from the -CURRENT snapshots, most recently the one from 20140903.
>>>> 
>>>> I am able to select "EFI Boot" on the USB device from the Mac's boot menu, and it does _something_, but the screen never changes--the image of the boot menu is displayed indefinitely. I think it is actually booting since there is drive activity and the caps lock key indicator starts working a few seconds in, but the screen just stays the same. Thinking the resolution of the Retina display may have been an issue, I tried booting with it disabled (lid closed) and an external monitor and keyboard. The result was the same--Mac boot menu frozen on the external display.
>>>> 
>>>> Is there anything I should try to troubleshoot or debug this issue? Anything else I should include in a PR? I can test patches if needed (probably after building an image including the patch from a VM).
>>>> 
>>> To be clear, which boot menu do you see?  If you see the FreeBSD loader
>>> menu, escape to the loader prompt and try:
>>> 
>>>    set kern.vty=vt
>>>    set hw.vga.textmode=1
>>>    boot
>>> 
>>> I am a bit unclear under which conditions 'hw.vga.textmode=1' is
>>> required, though.
>> No, I don't ever see the FreeBSD loader. I see the menu you get on a Mac when you hold down the option (alt) key while booting--big disk icons representing the bootable disks/partitions in the system. In my case it was the "Macintosh HD" volume (Mac OS Mavericks), my Windows partition, and the USB stick with the FreeBSD memstick image on it, which the Mac just called "EFI Boot" (and the icon was that of a USB disk). There is also a little section at the bottom that allows wifi network booting (if you've done all the black magic (not PXE) to get that to happen). It shows a circular activity animation while it scans for wireless networks. That animation stops when I select the USB EFI icon and press enter (and that is the only visual indication I get that I made a selection).
> 
> To see the FreeBSD (U)EFI boot loader on the Mac, you need to install an EFI shell like rEFIt on either your hard drive or a HFS formatted memory stick:
> 1) Download the rEFIt installer from here: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/refit/rEFIt/0.14/rEFIt-0.14.dmg?r=http%3A%2F%2Frefit.sourceforge.net%2F&ts=1410181876&use_mirror=optimate
> 2) Open the downloaded file
> 3) Run the following command from the terminal: sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/rEFIt/rEFIt.mpkg -tgt /Volumes/memstick (in this example, I'm using an HFS formatted memory stick).
> 4) Run the command "sudo /Volumes/memstick/efi/enable.sh"
> 5) When you reboot your Mac, when you hold down the alt key, choose rEFIt on the startup menu. Then, choose the "BOOTx64.efi from …" option
> If everything now goes as it should, you should see the FreeBSD loader. When the "Press enter to boot or any other key to go to loader in X seconds" (or whatever it says), press a random key. Then try to type the commands suggested by [Glen Barber].

Thanks all, made _some_ progress.

I installed rEFInd on my internal hard drive and now I can get to (and see!) the FreeBSD EFI loader. Unfortunately that's about as far as it gets. Once I tell the loader to boot it displays the EFI framebuffer information and then nothing else. This happens with 'kern.vty=vt' set and with or without 'hw.vga.textmode=1'.

Screenshot here: https://blog.jnielsen.net/images/efiloader.jpg

What should the next troubleshooting steps be?

JN