Does this work with MacBookAir8,2?

[fl4co]

Hi,

I'm trying to make my 2019 Air work with Arch. I pacstrapped base and linux-firmware, then installed linux-mbp and apple-bce-git from your repository.

It boots but the keyboard doesn't work. I'm not able to find out what it's wrong or even if this is supposed to work, but if you want to add support for this model I'm willing to help testing things.

Cheers

[aunali1]

Hi @fl4co!

The MacBookAir8,2 should work without issue. If you have an extra USB keyboard lying around, can you check if the apple_bce kernel module is being loaded? A simple $ lsmod | grep bce should do it. If not, try modprobing after boot.

[fl4co]

Hey aunali1, that did the trick, thank you. I managed to ssh into the machine and modprobed from there. Should the module be loaded automatically? Anyway, I added the apple_bce module into a conf file inside /etc/modules-load.d, and I have keyboard functionality at boot.
However, I can't login anymore because when I input the username it never makes it to the password field. It continues to register inputs from the keyboard but never asks for the password :S.
I'll look into this in the following days.

[aurelien-brabant]

Any news about your situation ? I've the exact same model and I experimented the same issue. Not at each boot, but really often. The macbook air 8,2 seems to have some problem dealing with linux-mbp in general, as it refuses to boot correctly most of the time. Sometimes however, it can randomly boot in a few seconds without any problem. That's really strange, and that occurs on all the linux-mbp distros I tried (ubuntu, arch and manjaro).

[fl4co]

No, I decided to give up Linux on that machine.