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

