Success with Intel Macbook Pro 14,1 (Mid-2017 i7)

Bluefin
1

After some rough starts, got Bluefin running on my old Intel Macbook.

First the Broadcom WiFi (BCM4350) didn’t work, but it seems to work on a newer build of Bluefin (thanks dev team!) The solution, if anybody is stuck here, looks like swapping out for the proprietary driver (ublue-os/bluefin/issues/1783). You can tether your phone over Bluetooth or USB cable for network access.

Then it wouldn’t wake correctly from sleep. I mean, it would wake after 30-60s or so, but nothing would launch, while already open apps functioned at least partially, which pointed to the NVME not being reachable. This appears to be an issue that most Linux distros experience with this generation of Macbook, including Ubuntu 24.04 which first appears to work, but then doesn’t (it permanently drops into Busybox).

I followed the steps to create a systemctl service that disables sleep on the NVME drive (reproduced here with minor edits for immutable Linux needs)

/etc/systemd/system/fix_sleep.service

# systemd oneshot service to set sleep boolean on Apple Macbook Pro disks
# Original by Pier Lim. Posted at https://kerpanic.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/apple-keyboard-get-function-keys-working-properly-in-ubuntu/

    [Unit]
    Description=Job that disables sleep from stopping nvme hardware on MBP
    
    [Service]
    ExecStart=/var/opt/fixsleep
    Type=oneshot
    RemainAfterExit=yes

    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target

You can verify with lspci, but it looks like the mass storage controller is consistently at 01:00.0 for this model.

/var/opt/fixsleep

#!/bin/bash
/bin/echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:01\:00.0/d3cold_allowed

You have to make it executable for selinux…
sudo chcon -t bin_t /var/opt/fixsleep

Then you can start the service…
systemctl start fix_sleep.service

The Macbook doesn’t wake immediately like it would on MacOS, but it does wake in about 30-60s and the system remains stable, so I am calling Bluefin on the Intel Macbook now a success!

There is some potential progress to be made on speed of wake from sleep - Fedora thread

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