Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

hrod · 2013-11-09 23:22:17

i just realized today that if i log into osx and set the screen brightness it persists across boots to my arch...

Last edited by hrod (2013-11-09 23:22:30)

DrKillPatient · 2013-11-10 18:08:44

baronmog wrote:

How did you even get that far, with the console as messed up as it is? I installed rEFInd and resized the MacOS partition (from OS X) easily enough. After booting from a usb stick with Arch ISO on it, the console is so garbled that I can't be certain that I'm reading things cgdisk correctly.

I'm just starting to work with my own 2013 rMBP; I can't even get rEFInd up and running. Did you install your copy on the OSX root partition? When I do so I get a sort of geiger-counter-ish sound and the screen just stays gray indefinitely. Am I missing a step somewhere?

EDIT: Apparently I needed to avoid installing EFI drivers (see this thread). I removed rEFInd and reinstalled it with the --nodrivers option; it now boots properly. Now, onto getting Arch to actually work...

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-10 19:26:45)

baronmog · 2013-11-11 00:48:40

DrKillPatient wrote:

baronmog wrote:
How did you even get that far, with the console as messed up as it is? I installed rEFInd and resized the MacOS partition (from OS X) easily enough. After booting from a usb stick with Arch ISO on it, the console is so garbled that I can't be certain that I'm reading things cgdisk correctly.
I'm just starting to work with my own 2013 rMBP; I can't even get rEFInd up and running. Did you install your copy on the OSX root partition? When I do so I get a sort of geiger-counter-ish sound and the screen just stays gray indefinitely. Am I missing a step somewhere?

I just ran the rEFInd install.sh script from OS X. After that I booted from an Arch Linux usb stick that I had created a GPT partition on (per the Wiki). Make sure to either add "nomodeset" to the boot options for Arch, otherwise the screen will be almost impossible to read, even in console mode.

DrKillPatient · 2013-11-11 17:55:15

baronmog wrote:

DrKillPatient wrote:
baronmog wrote:
How did you even get that far, with the console as messed up as it is? I installed rEFInd and resized the MacOS partition (from OS X) easily enough. After booting from a usb stick with Arch ISO on it, the console is so garbled that I can't be certain that I'm reading things cgdisk correctly.
I'm just starting to work with my own 2013 rMBP; I can't even get rEFInd up and running. Did you install your copy on the OSX root partition? When I do so I get a sort of geiger-counter-ish sound and the screen just stays gray indefinitely. Am I missing a step somewhere?
I just ran the rEFInd install.sh script from OS X. After that I booted from an Arch Linux usb stick that I had created a GPT partition on (per the Wiki). Make sure to either add "nomodeset" to the boot options for Arch, otherwise the screen will be almost impossible to read, even in console mode.

I know that to be the case on the earlier rMBPs, but it actually seems to work better without on this one. I've not installed X yet but in the vconsole the text is much clearer without nomodeset. Tiny, certainly, but very sharp. Nomodeset makes it blurry. I do have "nointremap" (recommended from previous rMBP configurations; I don't know if this is necessary for this model) and "libata.force=noncq" (because apparently the SSD hangs occasionally unless this is set; I've not been using it long enough to confirm but will try with and without the option later).

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-11 17:59:29)

baronmog · 2013-11-11 19:36:09

DrKillPatient wrote:

I know that to be the case on the earlier rMBPs, but it actually seems to work better without on this one. I've not installed X yet but in the vconsole the text is much clearer without nomodeset. Tiny, certainly, but very sharp. Nomodeset makes it blurry. I do have "nointremap" (recommended from previous rMBP configurations; I don't know if this is necessary for this model) and "libata.force=noncq" (because apparently the SSD hangs occasionally unless this is set; I've not been using it long enough to confirm but will try with and without the option later).

Which MBP do you have? Mine is the 15" with Intel video only.

eyl · 2013-11-11 20:54:33

baronmog wrote:

DrKillPatient wrote:
I know that to be the case on the earlier rMBPs, but it actually seems to work better without on this one. I've not installed X yet but in the vconsole the text is much clearer without nomodeset. Tiny, certainly, but very sharp. Nomodeset makes it blurry. I do have "nointremap" (recommended from previous rMBP configurations; I don't know if this is necessary for this model) and "libata.force=noncq" (because apparently the SSD hangs occasionally unless this is set; I've not been using it long enough to confirm but will try with and without the option later).
Which MBP do you have? Mine is the 15" with Intel video only.

I posted my install process on my website, https://eyolfson.ca/ (YMMV). I can confirm that without "libata.force=noncq" you'll get 20 second delays accessing the SSD.

It seems the only want to make sure it boots, even after a NVRAM reset, you have to install the EFI file to /EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi.

Last edited by eyl (2013-11-11 20:55:36)

hrod · 2013-11-11 22:17:22

baronmog wrote:

DrKillPatient wrote:
I know that to be the case on the earlier rMBPs, but it actually seems to work better without on this one. I've not installed X yet but in the vconsole the text is much clearer without nomodeset. Tiny, certainly, but very sharp. Nomodeset makes it blurry. I do have "nointremap" (recommended from previous rMBP configurations; I don't know if this is necessary for this model) and ...
Which MBP do you have? Mine is the 15" with Intel video only.

he must have MacbookPro11,1 the 13" with HD5100, because you definitely need nomodeset atm for 15" with HD5200

bekos · 2013-11-12 02:22:18

Hello

I got a MacBookPro 15 with the 1TB SSD a couple of weeks ago. As already mentioned there is a 20 seconds freeze every 5-10 minutes that is caused by the hard disk or the hard disc controller (the dmesg reports ATA errors). In my case the flag "libata.force=noncq" didn't work and I had to set /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth to 1. But this can not be considered to real solution. My questions are the following:
1) Anybody has any idea why this error occurs?
2) Are the Linux kernel developers aware of this issue? What is the best way to report it? Is it considered a bug? Are you aware if anyone is working to fix this error?
3) Is there anyone with a Late 2013 MacBookPro who doesn't have this issue?
4) No matter if you have this problem or not, could you post your SSD info? I am curious is this happens only on the 1TB SSD or in any of them.

Btw I am using Debian [sid] with Kernel 3.11-1-amd64

Thank you.

baronmog · 2013-11-12 02:58:20

bekos wrote:

Hello
I got a MacBookPro 15 with the 1TB SSD a couple of weeks ago. As already mentioned there is a 20 seconds freeze every 5-10 minutes that is caused by the hard disk or the hard disc controller (the dmesg reports ATA errors). In my case the flag "libata.force=noncq" didn't work and I had to set /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth to 1.

Where did you set libata.force=noncq? /etc/defaults/grub? If so, did you rerun `grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg`? That bit me the first time, as I've always just used grub v 0.x before, and not had to mess with v2's grub-mkconfig.

bekos wrote:

But this can not be considered to real solution. My questions are the following:
1) Anybody has any idea why this error occurs?
2) Are the Linux kernel developers aware of this issue? What is the best way to report it? Is it considered a bug? Are you aware if anyone is working to fix this error?
3) Is there anyone with a Late 2013 MacBookPro who doesn't have this issue?
4) No matter if you have this problem or not, could you post your SSD info? I am curious is this happens only on the 1TB SSD or in any of them.
Btw I am using Debian [sid] with Kernel 3.11-1-amd64
Thank you.

1) Other than the general "SSD/controller overwhelmed" hand waving, no.
2) Well, you can brave the linux-kernel mailing list (be sure to read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/). Or, there's https://bugzilla.kernel.org/ .
I haven't gotten around to researching the topic further, personally.
3) Dunno. It's certainly an issue on my MacBook Pro 11,2.
4) So, my SSD info from dmesg is:

[    2.085376] ata1.00: ATA-8: APPLE SSD SM0512F, UXM2JA1Q, max UDMA/133
[    2.085380] ata1.00: 977105060 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (not used)
[    2.085915] ata1.00: unexpected _GTF length (8)
[    2.086091] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[    2.086287] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      APPLE SSD SM0512 UXM2 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

That's the 512 GB SSD. The NCQ problem cropped up with the 3.10.6-1 (initial install), 3.11.6-1 and 3.12.48.gbe408cd-1 (build from git) kernels.

DrKillPatient · 2013-11-12 04:38:50

Argh, I had Xorg working with the intel driver and modesetting, but it stopped working just now, seemingly at random — I installed xmonad and that's about it. The last thing I did was to use xrandr with the --scale option, which caused a blank screen and now it's seemingly screwed something up internally. The screen now goes blank every time on boot unless I put nomodeset in the boot options now. The fbdev driver works, but that's... undesirable. Is there any chance I can restore the properly-functioning modesetting now? It definitely worked fine earlier.

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-12 04:49:46)

hrod · 2013-11-12 07:49:48

is the only way to change 'efi boot' to 'arch' in the hold alt menu by editing apple's stuff?

eyl wrote:

It seems the only want to make sure it boots, even after a NVRAM reset, you have to install the EFI file to /EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi.

yeah, i believe that's quite standard though: archwiki and microsoft help

baronmog wrote:

Where did you set libata.force=noncq? /etc/defaults/grub? If so, did you rerun `grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg`? That bit me the first time, as I've always just used grub v 0.x before, and not had to mess with v2's grub-mkconfig.

you could skip /etc/defaults/grub and just edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg, either way you still have to make the standalone bootx64.efi and move it to the efi partition which is annoying, but i guess it's not something you edit that often

bekos wrote:

I got a MacBookPro 15 with the 1TB SSD a couple of weeks ago. As already mentioned there is a 20 seconds freeze every 5-10 minutes that is caused by the hard disk or the hard disc controller (the dmesg reports ATA errors). In my case the flag "libata.force=noncq" didn't work and I had to set /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth to 1.

it worked for me, no hangs since i did it and no more dmesg errors

Last edited by hrod (2013-11-12 07:58:34)

bekos · 2013-11-12 10:15:35

Yes, you are right. I wasn't aware of this grub-mkconfig. Thank you for pointing it out. But well, I will leave it as is now with the /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth set to 1 because it seems to work fine. Thanks again!

DrKillPatient · 2013-11-12 15:48:22

DrKillPatient wrote:

Argh, I had Xorg working with the intel driver and modesetting, but it stopped working just now, seemingly at random — I installed xmonad and that's about it. The last thing I did was to use xrandr with the --scale option, which caused a blank screen and now it's seemingly screwed something up internally. The screen now goes blank every time on boot unless I put nomodeset in the boot options now. The fbdev driver works, but that's... undesirable. Is there any chance I can restore the properly-functioning modesetting now? It definitely worked fine earlier.

OK, I have some further info here. (Also, I am indeed running the 13-inch late 2013 rMBP with Intel integrated graphics. Sorry about not noting that before.) The line of dmesg just before the screen blank occurs is as follows (approximately — I copied these down on paper, so the wording may be slightly off):

Conflicting fb usage inteldrmfb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver
fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
drm: registered panic notifier

It looks like there's a driver conflict. Is there another system log from which I can get further information on this?

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-12 16:50:24)

baronmog · 2013-11-12 17:38:02

DrKillPatient wrote:

It looks like there's a driver conflict. Is there another system log from which I can get further information on this?

You can run journalctl to look at the system logs. Unlike other system log implementations, systemd doesn't seem to maintain a plain text log file in /var/log/ that you can directly view or parse with less or grep.

chutsu · 2013-11-14 16:37:40

I was looking at the Wiki, but I got slightly confused. Do you need internet to install Arch on the Pro 15 Retina?

jsmith · 2013-11-14 17:34:56

Does anyone know where to start to get suspend working? That's the only thing really holding me up switching to my new rMBP at the moment.

baronmog · 2013-11-14 19:12:08

jsmith wrote:

Does anyone know where to start to get suspend working? That's the only thing really holding me up switching to my new rMBP at the moment.

I've got hibernate and suspend mostly working on my rMBP 11,2, using acpi and the kernel backend (as described in the wiki). However, suspend seems a little glitchy (sometimes doesn't actually suspend), and resume from hibernate is really quite fast, so I just use hibernate instead. The one thing I haven't gotten working is auto-suspend/hibernate based on inactivity. KDE is perfectly happy to hibernate when I manually click the hibernate button, but does not do so in response to inactivity or closing the lid.

baronmog · 2013-11-14 19:14:10

chutsu wrote:

I was looking at the Wiki, but I got slightly confused. Do you need internet to install Arch on the Pro 15 Retina?

The installer downloads packages from repositories on the Internet. However, this is my first Arch install, so there may be some way around that that I didn't see.

hrod · 2013-11-15 01:32:38

hey guys i have linux 3.12-1 installed from core

I still don't have backlight control. But Niko edited the wiki page to say "works via /sys/class/backlight/gmux_backlight/brightness (at least with kernel 3.12.0-1)". So i suspect he has 11,1, the 13" version with HD5100 which might work. Does anyone else with 11,2 have working backlight? If not we should note this in the wiki.

---

baronmog wrote:

I've got hibernate and suspend mostly working on my rMBP 11,2, using acpi and the kernel backend (as described in the wiki).

for me suspend results in no backlight after resume, what did you do to fix that?

chutsu wrote:

I was looking at the Wiki, but I got slightly confused. Do you need internet to install Arch on the Pro 15 Retina?

you don't need the internet, but if you have the internet you can install some more packages that wern't incorporated into your installer iso, and some of the packages you might need to install could be ones vital to completing the installation on you specific machine.. also if you use the netboot iso it will have fewer packages incorporated into it than the full version

thanks

Last edited by hrod (2013-11-17 23:07:09)

dedsm · 2013-11-16 18:49:04

does anyone know how to disable the nvidia card (or at least enable the intel) on the Macbook 11,3 ? I don't even see it in lspci

ende42 · 2013-11-17 00:11:43

hrod wrote:

hey guys i have linux 3.12-1 installed from core
I still don't have backlight control. But Niko edited the wiki page to say "works via /sys/class/backlight/gmux_backlight/brightness (at least with kernel 3.12.0-1)". So i suspect he has 11,1, the 13" version with HD5100 which might work. Does anyone else with 11,2 have working backlight? If not we should note this in the wiki.

I got the 11,3 15" HD5200+750m version and screen brightness control just worked.

Sleep/resume just worked out of the box per lid close/open but I actually don't know whether the box does hibernate or suspend. How do I find out?

I'm running X with fbdev. xrandr only reports the native resolution (that's due to fbdev, right?). I started X with some 190 DPI and configured i3 and dmenu with huge fonts so some of the fonts are scaled up. Still app icons, the mouse pointer and part of the fonts are tiny.

WiFi is reasonably stable for me as well. Didn't test the speed so far.

Speaker don't work.

For some reason the optical audio LED is off now. It's always been on so far. EDIT: Now it's on again. Oh, well.

Having just the native resolution is my main issue at the moment.

Niko.

Last edited by ende42 (2013-11-17 00:32:36)

ende42 · 2013-11-17 10:06:58

Yesterday I put the laptop to sleep by closing the lid. Today after wakeup i3 hung. I had just chromium opened, new desktops would show the watch. I couldn't launch any other program, just swich desktops. journalctl doesn't show anything suspicious as far as I can tell.

Niko.

Last edited by ende42 (2013-11-17 10:12:17)

ende42 · 2013-11-17 23:12:44

I'd love to have installation instructions for the patch Jcoffland is mentioning in the wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … x#Graphics).

Niko.

DrKillPatient · 2013-11-18 06:07:23

Just installed kernel 3.12 on my 13" rMBP; the speakers now show up in amixer (they didn't on 3.11), but still no external sound. Adding model=mba6 to the snd_hda_intel options doesn't help; I'll try the patch later when I get the chance. Overall, no big deal; I don't use the external speakers too often anyway. I've not checked the webcam yet, since I also use that quite rarely, but so far everything else seems to be working perfectly well.

Upgrading to 3.12 seems to have knocked out my WiFi capability, though... I reinstalled broadcom-wl, which fixed it, but I suspect this will happen each kernel upgrade. Is there anything I can do in this respect? Broadcom-wl-dkms from the AUR doesn't appear to help. (By the way, my WiFi is actually quite stable so far, contrary to some earlier issues people have had -- I get ~12 Mb download, ~1.5 Mb upload consistently in both Linux and OS X on my home connection. I know that's not a particularly fast connection, though -- perhaps the upper limit is lower for Linux?)

Last edited by DrKillPatient (2013-11-18 06:18:27)

bekos · 2013-11-18 06:22:23

@ende42, @DrKillPatient: Do you have the freeze issue related to the disk or the controller? Does dmesg report any ATA errors? Do you have NCQ enabled? Which SSD model you got?
Thanks.

Arch Linux

#26 2013-11-09 23:22:17

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#27 2013-11-10 18:08:44

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#28 2013-11-11 00:48:40

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#29 2013-11-11 17:55:15

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#30 2013-11-11 19:36:09

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#31 2013-11-11 20:54:33

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#32 2013-11-11 22:17:22

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#33 2013-11-12 02:22:18

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#34 2013-11-12 02:58:20

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#35 2013-11-12 04:38:50

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#36 2013-11-12 07:49:48

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#37 2013-11-12 10:15:35

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#38 2013-11-12 15:48:22

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#39 2013-11-12 17:38:02

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#40 2013-11-14 16:37:40

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#41 2013-11-14 17:34:56

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#42 2013-11-14 19:12:08

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#43 2013-11-14 19:14:10

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#44 2013-11-15 01:32:38

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#45 2013-11-16 18:49:04

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#46 2013-11-17 00:11:43

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#47 2013-11-17 10:06:58

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#48 2013-11-17 23:12:44

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#49 2013-11-18 06:07:23

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#50 2013-11-18 06:22:23

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

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