Hi All,
I got a 2018 Mac Mini that I want to use to replace my Rasberry CM4 + DFRobot Iot Router board.
I know I might have to buy a usc-c to ethernet in order to have the dual NIC but my issue is that I can't find anywhere clear details around how to intstall OpenWRT on Mac.
I already disable the T2 Chip and I tried to boot from USB using this image:
openwrt-18.06.4-x86-64-combined-ext4-efi.img
Unfortunately I get immediately an error and then it gets stuck
I would be surprised if you can get a completely (or at all) functional OpenWrt system (unless you install it inside something like LXC container) on a Mac because of driver availability, but the first thing to try is an up-to-date OpenWrt image which comes with an up-to-date kernel, rather than a 7-year-old version (18.06.4) which you picked for some reason.
Try fedora or ubuntu, then populate with VMs using gnome boxes or virt-manager.
Mac is really challenging for linux, you must chainload efi then part bios then (maybe signed blessed) grub and kernel.
Depending on the specific Mac model, some of the built-in boot restrictions can be lifted by booting the Mac into the recovery mode and then changing boot-related security options there (I can't recall the exact procedure but it's easy to find). Considering the fact that the OP got to run the Linux kernel at all, I assume that it's either irrelevant to their specific Mac model, or they've already done this.
I bet that it's getting stuck waiting for root device because of missing driver for nvme or something similar. But that is a moot point, considering the ultra-old kernel.
There's no point even talking about this, unless you test a 24.10.1 combined-efi image. While that might not necessarily work either, at least it has a fighting chance to, while 18.07.x certainly doesn't.
