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Boot iPXE on macbook pro using BSDP

1 vote
1 answer
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I've recently acquired a second-hand macbook pro from 2013 with a wiped disk, and wish to make it useful. While I understand the recommendations are to either use the internet Recovery system to install macOS, or connect a Thunderbolt cable and make use of Target Disk Mode in order to install anything else, I still wish to provision an operating system in a cleaner and more reproducible automated way. Surely that should be possible? On non-apple hardware I typically use iPXE, and this answer tells that to be possible also on any intel-based macbook if booting from removable media. The way I understand things, it also ought to be possible to boot iPXE over the network using Apple's Boot Service Discovery Protocol (BSDP) , as accessed by pressing N to launch a NetInstall from a NetBoot server . It seems all one needs to know, is how to populate the configuration for one's DHCP and tftp servers. The Wikipedia page on BSDP is quite technical. Together with the specification it references, it appears to be detailed enough to allow setting up this two-stage network boot solution which I am after. Yet it seems fiddly enough to motivate asking first; Does this SE community know of any previous attempts to serve iPXE over BSDP? (Related answers about success stories or other implementations than Apple's serving of macOS over BSDP could perhaps also be interesting and on topic?) One possible problem I see is regarding driver support. While iPXE does have some support for booting over wifi , I'm unsure of if it will work with the device in the macbook. Running ioreg | grep AirPort in the rescue shell reveals a BroadCom 4360. There is support for Broadcom bcm44xx cards in the source tree , but I have no clue of whether those model numbers might be close enough to be similar technology.
Asked by sampi (111 rep)
May 20, 2024, 11:49 AM
Last activity: Jun 16, 2025, 06:01 PM