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Hector Martin

Calling Sonoma users: We have had a few reports of Sonoma upgrades causing issues with Asahi (installed before or after the upgrade). These issues may be related to reports of Sonoma corrupting System recoveryOS, which is apparently a known issue in general (happens in rare cases). This is all almost certainly caused by one or more Apple bugs.

If you are running Sonoma (with or without Asahi), would you mind helping us by testing your System RecoveryOS? To do so, fully power down your machine and wait a few seconds, and then quickly tap and hold the power button (quickly press, release, press and hold; this is a double press, not the usual single press and hold). If you get the boot picker as usual, then your System recoveryOS is OK. If you get a "please recover me" exclamation mark screen, your System recoveryOS is broken.

If you have the bug, please let me know, as I would like to investigate what is going wrong and whether we can detect it somehow (or maybe even write a fixer tool). Ideally I'd want to either get temporary SSH access to macOS or dumps of files in certain partitions.

The reason why this is important is that there is a possibly related issue where Sonoma boot firmware won't boot our 13.5 Asahi macOS stubs, including recovery mode. That means that you can get stuck not being able to use the boot picker, and if your System recoveryOS is also broken, then there is no way to recover locally (you need a DFU revive), which sucks. I want to at the very least detect this bad state and refuse installation if the installer detects your recoveryOS is borked.

Your machine should go back to normal after a forced shutdown and reboot from the exclamation mark screen, as long as your regular boot OS and paired recoveryOS are fine.

31 Oct 2023 at 8:26 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
15 comments
Lina :apusheencomputer:

@marcan macbook air m1 with latest sonoma 14.1 release, ive been running sonoma beta since the summer. just tried the test out and recoveryos booted normally.

31 Oct 2023 at 8:35 | Open on hachyderm.io
Vegard Løkken

@marcan I'm running Sonoma 14.1 (23B74) on a M1 Macbook Air and just tried rebooting into Asahi and then back to macOS. Not able to reproduce the issue here - the boot picker works just fine.

31 Oct 2023 at 8:37 | Open on mastodon.social
Akihiko Odaki

@marcan Not reproducible on my M2 MacBook Air with Sonoma installed; I saw the boot picker after press-release-press&hold (hope I did it right).

31 Oct 2023 at 8:58 | Open on mstdn.maud.io
Sébastien de Graffenried

@marcan when I do the double press, I get “continue holding for startup options”, then “launching startup options” then a black screen. The computer seems to be on, I have to hold the power button to shut it down before I can start it up again. Could that be it?

31 Oct 2023 at 9:17 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Hector Martin

@seb_degraff Wow, okay, that's a new one for System RecoveryOS!

What happens if you do a normal press and hold? And what OSes do you have installed, and what is your default boot OS?

31 Oct 2023 at 9:20 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Sébastien de Graffenried

@marcan only sonoma installed. Normal press and hold works, I see the startup options

31 Oct 2023 at 9:37 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Hector Martin

@seb_degraff Huh, interesting. Would you mind if I debug a bit? At the very least it would be great if you can grab some system files, I can give you instructions of what to get (though it'll be a bit large, maybe 2GB with all the recoveryOS stuff).

This case is particularly interesting because either you have an older System RecoveryOS than your boot firmware (which would be a first), or both System and Paired RecoveryOS are Sonoma but somehow one works and the other one doesn't, which might help us pinpoint exactly what causes the screen snafu.

Happy to do this over a videocall or something like that if you prefer.

@seb_degraff Huh, interesting. Would you mind if I debug a bit? At the very least it would be great if you can grab some system files, I can give you instructions of what to get (though it'll be a bit large, maybe 2GB with all the recoveryOS stuff).

This case is particularly interesting because either you have an older System RecoveryOS than your boot firmware (which would be a first), or both System and Paired RecoveryOS are Sonoma but somehow one works and the other one doesn't, which might help...

31 Oct 2023 at 9:56 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Hayato Fujii

@marcan Is System recoveryOS the one which doesn't allow changes to Startup Security?

31 Oct 2023 at 9:23 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Hector Martin

@hayatofujii Yes, to *any* OS, because those changes can only happen from the paired RecoveryOS to a given OS and System RecoveryOS isn't paired to anything.

However, non-1TR boot of paired RecoveryOS is also unable to change startup security settings, so that is not an infallible sign that you're in srOS.

31 Oct 2023 at 9:25 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Hayato Fujii

@marcan Thanks for the information. I think I did it right: my srOS has an option to clean install of Ventura. macOS paired recoveryOS does offer Sonoma. I run a 14.0 install.
Updating to 14.1 right now.

Edit: no dice, the installed srOS is good.

31 Oct 2023 at 9:36 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Hanchin Hsieh

@marcan@social.treehouse.systems I’m a Sonoma user and mine M1Max recovery OS is fine after tested.

31 Oct 2023 at 10:22 | Open on dvd.chat
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