[Solved] Debian 12.4 amd64 installer bootia32.efi (Mac Pro 1,1 2,1) stalls

[walterav]

Finally after many years, the Debian 12.4 amd64 installer contains a bootia32.efi but currently its broken for Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1(32bit efi) The Mac Pro 3,1 efi64 works fine. In the past both debian and ubuntu 64bit systems 2016-~2020 were able to be installed on these 32 bit efi Apple machines by manually imaging a system image which contained a bootia32 with grub2 and that booting the 64bit kernel from USB or internal SATA was working fine. Even 'efibootmgr" worked fine on these machines!

But recently both new debian and ubuntu installs won't boot anymore but just stalls while trying to boot the kernel after grub. Screen stays black or shows last grub screen.

STEPS to REPRODUCE:
When holding [ALT/OPTION] key on mac for choosing the boot-picker while its powering on it will show the USB drive containing the dd'ed debian amd64 12.4 netinstall image and will load the grub2 screen with no problem.
However after choosing to boot a installer option from grub2 "graphical" or "cli" the screen freezes!

Debian 12.4 its bootia32.efi grub booting and installing a 64bit kernel is however functional for a other efi32 machine I tested recently the pipo x8 (with the 32bit windows and 32bit UEFI firmware) so it only seems broken for mac EFI32: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebia ... /PIPO%20X8

DEBUGGING:
For debugging I might try to boot my earlier made image(s) maybe using the grub2 loader that worked with older ubuntu/debian kernel, but trying to boot the new debian 12.4 kernel from the current installer. Or the new grub loader from the current 12.4 installer trying to load the older kernel from my previous image...

Any 'grub2' or 'kernel' related issues hints that introduced this behaviour?

[walterav]

Machine installs and boots with "noefi" kernel parameter. This parameter wasn't needed for a while only in the early days of efi32 booting see ubuntu wiki, still unknown what triggered this dependency again...

[Aki]

Machine installs and boots with "noefi" kernel parameter. This parameter wasn't needed for a while only in the early days of efi32 booting see ubuntu wiki, still unknown what triggered this dependency again...

I'm glad you sorted it out. :)

Please, mark the discussion as "solved" manually adding the text tag "[Solved]" at the beginning of the subject of the first message (after other tags, if any); for example:

[Solved] Debian 12.4 amd64 installer bootia32.efi (Mac Pro 1,1 2,1) stalls

Happy Debian ! .)

[walterav]

I'm glad you sorted it out.

Besides the workaround being reported upfront on the dated hardware Debian wiki and was already part of my personal notes but #commented... wouldn't thought it was the solution.

Another workaround might be `nokaslr` but still need to verify will close it for now.