I have a working asahi installation with grub set up + various partitions. How can I install Fedora without making an entirely new m1n1/boot partition for it?
One thing I tried was downloading the boot.img and root.img installer files and copying them to a partition, but I got an error that said something like bad magic number with the defalt kernel, and even with my custom kernel systemd gave some errors booting up.
There is no supported way to install multiple distros with the same m1n1/boot partition. If you want to replace your existing install, just delete all the partitions (guide) and do a fresh install that will do all the right things. If you want them side by side, you’ll have to free up disk space and do a separate install (the installer will do macOS resizing for you, if you want to shrink your existing install you’ll have to do that manually from Linux/etc which is left as an exercise for the reader).
Obviously it’s possible to do all the install steps manually, but you’d just be doing what the installer is doing. There are a lot of subtleties to the process, and it’s not worth trying to document and walk through everything. Plus you might get stuck on an old firmware version (for Fedora we require 13.5 for official support). Please just use the installer, it’s there to make all this easy and reliable.
Trying to run multiple OS installs under the same boot container is likely to result in fireworks once we start doing firmware updates, adding SEP support, etc. Please don’t do that. We made the decision early on that side-by-side multi-booting is handled at the native Apple boot picker layer, for very good reasons. It’s okay to do things like live boot from USB as a one-off recovery thing and such, but every “real” install intended to be used tied to a machine should be installed as a separate APFS stub with its own m1n1/bootloader. Obviously we can’t stop you from doing otherwise, but please don’t expect support in that case.
Thanks! It’s kind of annoying having the 2.5Gb stub partitions for each install, but I suppose it makes more sense than two separate installs managing the same one…