wifi – Boot iPXE on macbook professional utilizing BSDP

Now I will reply my very own query, after seemingly having gone down one rabbit-hole and are available up via one other.

Because the dialog within the feedback on the query goes, it ought to in all probability be attainable to position iPXE in an Apple Disk Picture inside a NetBoot Picture and chainload into it utilizing BSDP. Nonetheless, as at all times, the satan is within the particulars and with my particular {hardware} (MacBookPro11,1; A1502 EMC 2678) this concept will not be possible to pursuit.

The weakest hyperlink is the wifi interface, the Broadcom bcm4360 with pci id 14e4:43a0. These playing cards aren’t just like the bcm44xx collection. As a matter of truth, they don’t seem to be even akin to different bcm43xx playing cards. The one datasheet one can ever discover for them, no less than with out signing an NDA, is a skinny eight web page doc describing trivial issues similar to its bodily dimensions. In contrast to the equally named playing cards, nobody has revealed any open-source drivers. To the very best of my understanding the wifi is virtually fully unusable with FreeBSD, illumos, NetBSD and OpenBSD. They solely work underneath Linux if loading binary blobs offered by Broadcom (alpine, arch, debian, ubuntu). One can safely assume that iPXE is not going to implement drivers for a tool not one of the open-source working techniques assist natively.

With no scarcity of voices believing info to be totally different, the very best place to look is the precise supply codes. The PCI_DEVID_BCM4360_D11AC fixed will not be used anyplace in FreeBSD, NetBSD fully lacks the anticipated PCI_PRODUCT_BROADCOM_BCM4360 fixed, and OpenBSD doesn’t point out the PCI_PRODUCT_BROADCOM_BCM4360 fixed when enumerating the listing of supported gadgets.

After I was given this laptop a fews days again, I believed one may run an open-source Darwin on it. It appears nevertheless that OpenDarwin was introduced lifeless in 2006, and PureDarwin misplaced traction round 2015. Even when there have been energetic communities, Apple would have been contractually prohibited to open-source their wifi-drivers, successfully making wifi-support macOS particular somewhat obtainable in Darwin¹.

Supposedly there are macbooks with different wifi chipsets. I am going to depart my very own reply unaccepted, hoping somebody will finally present a solution which really offers a full answer to the specified use-case for anybody with a supported card.