Help needed: Intel-based Mac dual boot testing Fedora

Hi folks,

if anyone has an Intel-based Mac (Macbook, Mac Mini) which could be used for dual-boot testing with Fedora 41, that would be very helpful. We don’t have any such hardware at hand at the moment.

The testing instructions are here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_dualboot_with_macOS

and the latest F41 release candidate (RC) can be found here:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/

If anyone has such a device and can test dual-boot, please do and report back either here, or submit the result to our test matrix:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Installation_Test#Miscellaneous

Thanks!

I read from the testcase that the test machine should be single-volumed (no other OSs installed). So I guess an installation on a secondary disk is probably not relevant?

It’s hard to find a Mac with a single-volume which is also Intel-based and has no T2 security chip.

testing on a second disk certainly wouldn’t be irrelevant. the classical use case we wanted to capture, though, was “I have a stock Mac and I want to try Fedora on it without losing macOS”.

This test is getting progressively less important as Intel Macs get older and less common, but it’s hard to say when we should stop treating it as release blocking…

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From what I have noticed, it is oftentimes that older Macs become good candidates for new Fedora installations, usually a few years after they stop receiving macOS updates. IIRC, Mac users asking for help this year here in the forums had Macs with models ranging between year 2012 to 2015.

Newer Intel Macs with T2 security chip (released 2018 and newer models), on the other hand, might not be relevant here[1], since they seem to be running only with patched kernels (e.g. via project t2linux.org).


  1. Please correct me if I’m wrong. ↩︎

@tqcharm I’d agree they become attractive targets for Fedora installs, but if the reason is that they stop receiving macOS updates, then it’s less likely that people will want to dual boot with macOS. A clean install is rather more straightforward than attempting to dual boot with macOS.

So I wanted to test an installation of F41 Workstation on a 2008 model MacBook[1].

The live installation boots fine, passes Plymouth, but stops before presenting the graphical live session. I’m receiving a black screen with an active cursor (no freeze). I can reach a tty console, and have saved an fpaste --sysinfo-short output[2].

Didn’t file a bug yet, as I don’t know if such old machines are relevant for the release.

Unfortunately cannot reproduce on a newer model, since the other Intel MBP I’ve got has a T2 security chip.


  1. Pretty old, I know, but currently running F40 Workstation just fine for casual browsing and text editing. Nvidia graphics with nouveau drivers ↩︎

  2. Can be posted here if useful. ↩︎

Yeah, please post the sysinfo output, and also journalctl output. Bug report is always fine! We can’t necessarily make it a blocker bug, but worth reporting, with the necessary info. Especially if it runs F40 OK.

Is it running F40 on X or on Wayland?

Unfortunately cannot reproduce on a newer model, since the other Intel MBP I’ve got has a T2 security chip.

Standard fedora boots and installs fine on newer Intel macs (with the t2 chip), they use uefi and work like regular x86_64 laptops. Nothing special has to happen with them for dual boot, the current installer handles the macos partition like any other unknown partition. I just tested the beta and it installs, boots, and displays graphics right.

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If you could test the Final RC - see download links at the top of Test Results:Fedora 41 RC 1.3 Installation - Fedora Project Wiki - and confirm that also works fine, it’d be great.

F40 on Wayland (logged in maybe once or twice with GNOME on X). Initial install was with F39. With the system upgrade to F40, I had to set the graphics renderer (env variable) to gl instead of the (back then) newly introduced ngl (action also suggested by the GNOME team for older graphics cards), because of some artifacts in GTK4 apps. Now with F41 and vulkan I have seen here some other reports regarding issues, but with GTK4 apps not starting on machines with hybrid graphics (not my case). Probably unrelated though.

Against which component should the bug be reported?

I tested the workstation live ISO on a 2020 Intel mac with the t2 chip. The installation works fine, it correctly handles dual booting with macos when you create a hfs+ partition and when you have free space on the disk. Hardware support is limited, but this is expected on stock Fedora. Enough of the system is supported to use the live ISO and installer without major problems. Graphics works fine with no artifacts too.

Recent blivet versions since at least f40 use the standard x86_64 uefi partitioning code on t2 macs, so this does not say anything about whether the ISO works on older macs too.

Submitted bug no. BZ2321400.

Interesting. On my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), when booting from the live ISO, after the graphical session is displayed, I have no keyboard and no touchpad support (or the system is frozen, the effect being the same: system unusable).

The apple-bce driver is not in upstream kernels, so some internal hardware is not supported. You can connect a USB keyboard and mouse to interact with the system. For full hardware support you need a kernel with some downstream patches. The upstream kernel has full support for the internal drive, usb ports, displays, and networking. This is enough to install Fedora and use the system, though I dont think it qualifies as working.

I did mention above that AFAIK t2linux or similar patches are needed in order to make Fedora work on Macs with T2 security chip. But when you said installation went fine on a T2 Mac, I thought it went “OOTB fine”. I have somehow also assumed the test was performed on a MBP, but you just mentioned Mac :smiley: . My mistake.

So I guess T2 MacBook Pros (and probably MacBook Airs) don’t really qualify for release validation testing.

T2 “desktop” macs have a lot of problems too, its just that its not as obvious. I tested if the installation works fine, hardware support is a different problem. Fedora doesn’t (I think?) officially support any intel macs with the t2 chip. T2 macs boot and are usable, but they are not fully supported like other platforms.

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