Fedora 22 on MacBook Pro

2015-09-20 22:17:00

My main laptop happens to be a MacBookPro8,2. I found that Fedora 22 does not install seamlessly on this machine, given the nature of two key pieces of hardware: wireless and hybrid graphics.

Broadcom BCM4331

I decided to use the proprietary broadcom-wl driver for my wireless; I tried the b43 driver, but found that it has some connectivity issues when using a 2.4GHz router (dropping and reconnecting every minute or so). For posterity, here’s how to set up b43.

# dnf install b43-fwcutter
# wget http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
# tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
# b43-fwcutter -w "/lib/firmware" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o

To set up the broadcom-wl driver, first set up rpmfusion:

# echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
# dnf install akmod-wl

Graphics

The MacBookPro8,2 model doesn’t handle hybrid graphics very well under Linux. vga_switcheroo doesn’t switch between the two, so you have to configure your boot steps to only load one card. See this bug for details.

Discrete ATI Radeon

Disabling the Intel card can be done by simply by disabling KMS. Edit /etc/default/grub, changing the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable to: rhgb quiet radeon.modeset=1 i915.modeset=0 radeon.dpm=1. This will boot the laptop with the ATI Radeon enabled.

Integrated Intel

Disabling the ATI card is more involved, but worth the heat & power savings you gain by keeping the ATI card off.

First, copy the grub-efi modules into your EFI partition: cp -R /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/ Then edit /etc/default/grub and add GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="iorw". This makes the outb command we use below available to GRUB at runtime. Next, edit /etc/grub.d/10_linux and add the following lines below each occurrence of echo " set gfxpayload=:

echo " outb 0x728 1"
echo " outb 0x710 2"
echo " outb 0x740 2"
echo " outb 0x750 0"

Then regenerate your grub.cfg: grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg. Once done, you shouldn’t need to redo these steps each time you upgrade your kernel.