Booting Haiku Natively (no VM) on brand new iMac (EFI)

1

Is is possible yet to boot Haiku natively on a new/recent EFI-based Mac (in this case, an iMac)?

If so, what do I need to do to get this working?

Thanks.

2

Anyone have any ideas on this?

3

It certainly boots on some EFI based macs, my macbook pro for example. How well/whether it will work for your particular machine is a completely different question.

To try it the process is exactly the same as for any other computer, download a CD, burn it, and try booting…

4

Thanks. Gave it a shot. Downloaded the ISO, burned it using Disk Utility.app, rebooted to the boot loader menu (the Haiku CD shows up with a generic CD icon and the caption says “Windows”), chose Haiku disc from boot menu, and waited for about 2 minutes, then the Haiku boot screen appeared, each stage lit up its corresponding icon (except the memory icon), then the screen went blank/black, and I waited again… this time for like 5 or 6 minutes. No sounds, no nothing. That’s as far as it got.

This is an iMac 27", Mid 2011
Processor 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB

Thanks again.

Maybe it’ll work in the next release.

Can’t wait. (Miss using my BeOS machine as my main work machine.)

5

[quote=dynexam] each stage lit up its corresponding icon (except the memory icon), then the screen went blank/black, and I waited again… this time for like 5 or 6 minutes. No sounds, no nothing. That’s as far as it got.
[/quote]
Could you try some of the boot loader options which you can enter by pressing shift while/before booting?

http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/bootloader.html

And If it still does not work, could you enable on screen debuging?

6

Tried Safe Mode, but that didn’t yield any different results.

The on-screen debug output might be helpful.

I took a video of where the debug output hangs for a while and then gives up and starts unloading modules and tearing everything down.

Here’s what it shows:

Last message repeated 7 times.
[this is where we hang for a minute or two]
prevent_allow:
periph_simple_exec:
[wait for a few seconds]
REG: Failed to open shadow passwd DB file “/etc/shadow”: No such file or directory
[wait for 10 seconds]
register_domain(5, internet6)
unregister_domain(0xcdb7f040, 5, internet6)
register_domain(1, internet)
unregister_domain(0xcdb7fa40, 1, internet)
etc…
[then screen flashes white, then black, then nothing happens after that]

7

Try downloading and installing EFI-It on your iMac. It worked for me with version R2.

8

further to EFI-it, the URL is http://download.cnet.com/rEFIt/3000-2248_4-92063.html
The software is called rEFIt. It allows multiple OS’s to be installed on one machine
on different disk partitions.
This worked well for me with Haiku R2 on an iMac, I am having difficulties with R4.