ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

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ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby monkeyvoodoo » Fri Oct 25, 2019 4:47 pm

I just got a new 2019 8-core Macbook booting from ZFS, and thought I'd share one caveat:

The Wiki instructions for creating the Preboot partition don't work on newer macs. What I had to do to get it working was mount the APFS Preboot volume, and rsync everything from /Volumes/Preboot/<uuid> to /Volumes/boot

Without doing this, the system always boots into the Boot Repair utility.
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Re: ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby lundman » Sun Oct 27, 2019 4:09 pm

Ah, yes my VMs aren't apfs so that seems reasonable.
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Re: ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby monkeyvoodoo » Fri Nov 01, 2019 11:45 am

It's not just an APFS thing. It's something specific to newer Macs. My older 2014 MacBook Pro boots just fine using only the instructions on the wiki. The firmware on the newer Macs needs some extra bits in the Preboot environment.
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Re: ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby lundman » Thu Nov 07, 2019 4:56 pm

Would you mind updating the wiki with the extra steps?
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Re: ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby monkeyvoodoo » Fri Nov 08, 2019 6:22 pm

Oh, hah! I had no idea I could, which is why I was posting about it here. Absolutely!
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Re: ZFS Boot on Recent (2019, and probably 2018) Macs

Postby Markospokus » Fri Nov 15, 2019 4:23 pm

Perhaps you could also easily create tutorial along this: https://openzfsonosx.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3288? :)
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