Re: Changing boot parameters on Debian standard ISO

On Mon, Jun 1, 2026 at 6:18 AM Thomas Schmitt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> some historical considerations:
>
> Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> > you will find the folks who keep the old PowerMac's alive at the
> > debian-powerpc mailing list
> > (<https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/>)
>
> In 2011 the Macs had Intel x86 CPUs. The PowerPC Mac era ended in 2006
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh
>
>
> > I'm not sure about your technical problems.  Usually you need a
> > blessed Apple partition to boot an old Mac.
>
> HFS/HFS+ blessing applies to files or directories, not to partitions.
> But indeed some x86 Macs seemed to need a HFS or HFS+ filesystem
> which had to be announced by an Apple Partition Map entry.
>
> One can see such a partition table in Debian amd64 ISOs where it marks
> the EFI partition with its FAT filesystem. It stems from Matthew
> Garret's work to get a bootable Fedora ISO for EFI and x86 Macs.
>   https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/11285.html
> But Debian never had a HFS+ filesystem image in its ISOs for which the
> APM would make sense.
>
> grub-mkrescue for x86 EFI still creates a HFS+ filesystem and marks it
> by an Apple Partition Map entry. But even GRUB's then developer
> Vladimir Serbinenko could not tell which x86 Mac generation needed HFS+
> for booting, when he submitted the HFS+ code for libisofs/xorriso.
> That was in 2012. So i assume that a 2011 Mac boots via EFI, not via
> HFS or HFS+.

Oh man, I forgot all about the cutover from PowerPC to Intel Core
cpu's around that time.  Thanks for the additional information.

Jeff