[SOLVED] Install Problems on 2019 Mac Pro (7,1)

[skennedy]

Has anyone had success installing on a 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) host? I have been attempting to install on the rack mount version without success so far. From an installation USB drive it usually gets to the point where it is initializing the clocksoure/identifying USB devices then the machine simply reboots with no error messages. Spelunking through google searches I saw some mention of possible video card and acpi issues. I have tried adding boot parameters in various combinations using nomodeset, acpi=off, vga=normal, efi=noruntime but I get the same results. I even installed directly to a USB devices and then tried booting from the USB but I see the same reboot.

I am waiting for a NVMe PCIe card to come in and I am going to plug a drive in that I have installed PVE onto from a MacBook Pro to see what results I can get with that. I am hopeful I can at least see the boot logs. I would love to hear from anyone else who has tried (or successfully!) installed onto a 2019 Mac Pro.

 

[Alwin Antreich]

You can also install Debian first and then add the Proxmox VE repository to install its packages. But I suppose you will need a more recent kernel then 5.4 to get hardware support.

 

[skennedy]

I was finally able to try installing again and I met with the same failures. My pre-installed NVMe cards reboot at the same point in the boot. I tried several versions of the Debian iso (including the test build from 2-22-2021) and they hang right after the "Switched to clocksource tsc" message.

I would love some additional ideas on how to debug this and where to go from here.

 

[skennedy]

I just read a thread of someone trying to install PopOS on a Mac Pro 7,1 and it had the silver bullet: intel_iommu=on. Adding this to the grub command line allowed it to boot off the pre-installed NVMe drive. I also confirmed adding it to the USB boot drive allowed the installer to continue past the previous point of rebooting but it seems to hang later.