Mac Pro (1,1) Hanging on boot trying to boot anything from 32bit GRUB newer than NixOS 19.03 (64bit)

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Hello, I have been trying to use my old Mac Pro 1,1 with modern NixOS, but I’m facing issues because of the Mac having IA32 UEFI and 64bit CPU’s.
I am trying to install a 64bit OS. 24.11 on 32bit works fine but running 32bit isn’t my goal.

I have managed to get 32bit GRUB booting 64bit NixOS, but for some reason, versions of NixOS newer than 19.03 seem to hang the computer upon trying to boot, USB devices turn off and the Mac gets locked up in the screen it previously was at.

I have also observed that trying to manually boot a minimal iso from GRUB that is newer than NixOS 19.03 causes GRUB to throw an error: “error: cannot load image”
The system configuration is a barebones configuration with GRUB enabled.

I have tried:

  • Reinstalling the bootloader.
  • Trying to manually boot from GRUB console.

Any help would be massively appreciated!

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I too have one of these Macs currently running ubuntu server. I’d like to migrate it to NixOS but the difficulties with the quirky 32bit UEFI make me hesitant. It was already a pain to get ubuntu server running reliably on this.

If you do reach some success, please keep us updated!