As mentioned earlier I am currently using a MacBook (3.1) as my main laptop. Everything is working fine except there is a noticeable delay when the machine is turned on until the boot loader, grub 0.97, appears. It is not a huge hassle but it is a little irritating. I wanted to setup lvm on my laptop so I took the opportunity to play around to try to remove this delay. Unfortunately I was not successful.
I found an interesting blog post describing the Mac EFI boot process. Using this as a guide I used parted to repartition sda as a GPT disk. I then created an EFI System Partition formatted as fat32. Inside this partition I created the required /efi/boot directory structure. I downloaded the latest Grub2 and compiled it as an EFI executable and installed it and all it's required modules along with a linux kernel into the /efi/boot directory.
The result was the machine successfully booted into Grub 2 and loaded the linux kernel however there was still a significant delay between power on and Grub 2 appearing.
I'm guessing that this delay is caused by one of two things:
Both of these are guesses and could both be incorrect. I don't understand why either of these would take as long as the delay I am seeing. For the moment I am putting up with the delay as there doesn't seem to be an easy way around it without installing OS X and/or rEFIt alongside Linux. I might have another go using an external hard drive at some point. I am at least now using lvm. I haven't used lvm before and am looking forward to playing around with it. As I understand it, lvm's snapshots have major performance issues which is a shame as this is something I would have used.