Arch Linux

penguins916

Member

Registered: 2011-01-21

Posts: 6

Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Hello,

I have been trying to enable my 9400m video card in my macbook pro 5,3 (the duel video card model).

What i have done:
I installed grub2 with refit using http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnMacbook as a guide.
Archlinux boots in efi mode and i can see both cards with lspci.

My efforts then shifted to getting x to work, with any video card...

when i run xinit, (using nvidia drivers) i get the splash screen (nvidia one) then a blank screen. (power in screen appears to turn off)
I have tried many a thing i found on the internet to get this to not happen, various boot options as well as xorg configs but nothing.

xorg worked before in bios emulation mode.

I have no idea what files you all would want to see, so i uploaded a bunch of logs and such to here. I will be more than happy to paste them here if wanted.

This has been my main focus, but i have noticed some other problems as well: keyboard randomly stops working, can't control back light, not even with nvclock -S 100 or sudo echo 1 > /sys/class/.../brightness

Has anybody else been using efi mode and had similar problems?

Side note: I an new to arch, and i am not sure if this should go into the Newbie Thread. I will be happy to move if needed.

Thanks for taking the time to read and consider,
Penguins

nTia89

Banned

From: varese, italy

Registered: 2008-12-22

Posts: 1,230

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

i've tried hundreds of times to configure arch in a macbook without obtain a good result.......sorry this is my only suggest

Last edited by nTia89 (2011-02-27 14:34:08)

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+pc: custom | AMD Opteron 175 | nForce4 Ultra | 2GB ram DDR400 | nVidia 9800GT 1GB | ArchLinux x86_64 w/ openbox
+laptop: Apple | MacBook (2,1) | 2GB ram | Mac OS X 10.4 -> DIED
+ultrabook: Dell | XPS 13 (9343) | 8GB ram | 256GB ssd | FullHD display | Windows 8.1 64bit ArchLinux x86_64 w/ Gnome

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Has anybody else been using efi mode and had similar problems?

As far as i know, it is not possible (yet?) to use the proprietary nvidia driver with EFI on Macbooks at this point.

If anyone has newer information on this, please do share.

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ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

penguins916

Member

Registered: 2011-01-21

Posts: 6

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Thanks for responding everybody. Sad news. I am going to keep at it though.
(now at least i can stop searching the internet for hours )

Do you know if anybody has had any success with vesa or nouveau drivers? When i try both i get various errors. (of course i do not have nouveau and nvidia installed at the same time)
I was only using nvidia drivers because they were acting the most promising, ie not crashing on xinit but actually displaying logo.

I will update if i make any progress. Thanks for the input.

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Do you know if anybody has had any success with vesa or nouveau drivers?

I think those could work, but they will probably lack any drm stuff then. My understanding is that EFI causes the graphics card not to be exposed directly, making hardware acceleration impossible. This would need to be solved with a bios and/or firmware update.

I'm not entirely sure this is the whole story, but that is what i gathered through earlier investigations.

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ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

penguins916

Member

Registered: 2011-01-21

Posts: 6

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Thanks for the information. It is clear i still have a lot to learn and a long journey ahead of me.

positiveZero

Member

Registered: 2011-05-10

Posts: 1

Re: Macbook pro efi boot xorg

Not sure what your status is now, but I have a MacBookPro5,1 running Arch and booting into EFI mode.  I'm using the binary nvidia drivers and while I can't switch between cards in Arch if I boot into OSX and make switch the cards and then reboot into arch I can manually set my xorg.conf to use the appropriate one and everything works (although I get some weird screen artifacts when using the 9400M in Linux).  I don't recall doing anything special, I just followed the instructions on the link given at the top of the post (now at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting since grub.enbug.org is down).