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Installing Linux on an Apple Xserve

So OSX is junk, we all know that :) What do you do with a nice quad-Xeon Xserve? Install Linux and use it as a Xen host. Sounds easy, but it’s not. I’ve not managed to get it to work yet, but here’s what I’ve gotten to work so far.

The Xserve uses EFI as a BIOS replacement. It does not have BIOS emulation that the desktop & laptop Apple models have. As such you need a Linux kernel with EFI support. To cut a long story short, there is no EFI support in x86_64. However, there should be in a few days time
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/13/604

We’ve gotten EFI to load a kernel. The kernel then hangs after loading and expanding the initrd. I think this is because it makes a BIOS call that does not exist. In order to get a kernel to load, ignore the optical drive. The easiest way is to get a fat formatted USB disk, copy a vmlinuz kernel and associated initrd onto it. Then run elilo to install the EFI version of lilo onto the USB disk. You’ll then have to tweak the elilo.conf file on the USB disk to point to the correct kernel and initrd.

I’ll update this “guide” in a few days, when we’ve (hopefully) gotten Debian installed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Installing Linux on an Apple Xserve”

  1. Tiago Henriques says:
    Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 3:05 am

    i could use a quad-Xeon Xserve at home. Am in deep need of a new machine since the one i use for fileserver/webserver/streaming server for mp3 is a bit crappy ,well its working till now, and i dont think if i was using Windows it could handle it but Debian is workin just fine on it, but if i had one of those could do a mailserver and possible movie stream server aswell… i was wondering will u be teaching BSc Software Enginnering the module of Operating Systems this year?

    Great Job with the blog

  2. Peter B. says:
    Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Could you provide your elilo.efi file? I have not been sucessful in getting one to work. I continually get a failure at system.h line 208 when elilo attempts to get video information.

    Thanks.

  3. Josh says:
    Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 12:57 am

    Aug 22nd of 2008? Its been a while now, any luck with this?

    Thanks for the post. Now I’ll stop trying to boot my ubuntu CD on this thing. ;)

  4. balor says:
    Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 5:44 pm

    I no longer have any XServe hardware so I’ve not been able to do any work on this. I was, at the time, waiting for Intel to land EFI support in the mainline kernel. I have been told by others that the support is now in mainline 2.6, but I’m unable to verify this.

  5. Jeroen says:
    Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 7:00 pm

    Have a look at the links on my website, you will find how to install Linux on Xserve.

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