[quantummagic]

Will this enable someone who buys an apple laptop to boot directly into a third-party OS, from a thumb drive? Last I heard, they were still too locked down to allow it.

[nicolas_17]

The bootloader doesn't even have a USB stack capable of reading external storage.

[astrange]

If you have kernel access you can do an OS-to-OS takeover from the original OS. That's how MkLinux worked on old Macs.

[nicolas_17]

Or you can just sign your Linux kernel from macOS recovery mode, which is what the Asahi Linux installer does already. No need for weird hacks.

You also don't have "kernel access" in macOS. After boot, the memory region corresponding to the macOS kernel is marked as read-only at the memory controller level.

[astrange]

> Or you can just sign your Linux kernel from macOS recovery mode, which is what the Asahi Linux installer does already. No need for weird hacks.

Does that work for USB boot?

> You also don't have "kernel access" in macOS. After boot, the memory region corresponding to the macOS kernel is marked as read-only at the memory controller level.

You can turn that off from recovery mode. (see `bputil`) It's needed to use dtrace.

[bigyabai]

Apple Silicon doesn't support UEFI, so no.

[quantummagic]

Obviously, this article might not result in any concrete improvements for Apple owners, but why do you say that UEFI the only way to boot to a thumb drive?

[pram]

Boot loaders like GRUB etc only work with UEFI/BIOS to state the obvious.