Freezes and crashes on MacBookPro15,2

[ronnystandtke]

I have a MacBookPro15,2 (a.k.a. A1989) and tried to build and load this module on a Debian Live system with the Linux kernel 5.8 from the official Debian backports. The module builds without any problem but some seconds after loading the module via insmod, the system freezes and a while later just reboots. Attached is the output of "dmesg -w" I captured via ssh from another machine. I hope it helps debugging and fixing the issue.

Another thing I noticed was that after rebooting into macOS, it showed an error message that my computer was rebooted because of a problem. The headline was "Fehlerbericht für bridgeOS" (German for "error report for bridgeOS").

Please tell me if I there is something else I can do to help fixing this issue.
Thank you very much for your work on this driver.

dmesg_output_bce.txt

[networkException]

In general the 5.8.x kernels have various problems with t2 patches, its hightly recommended to just use 5.7.x

[ronnystandtke]

Thank you very much for the info. The Debian Live system I am working on needs to support as much hardware as possible (besides MacBooks also all the standard hardware of the Lenovos, HPs, Dells, Acers, etc. of the world). Therefore we need the most current kernel version to keep up with the most current hardware our students bring along.

Then let's hope that the T2 patches and drivers get adopted to newer kernel versions and maybe even upstreamed so that we can just use the default Debian kernel package and everything works out-of-the-box.

[networkException]

Oh ok. As far as I know it's some init (order) issue in the newer kernel versions. A few weeks ago aunali1, who is working on an arch kernel, actually mentioned a way how get newer versions to work.

@here it seems a temporary workaround to get 5.8.x working is to boot using the recovery ramdisk, so in the grub menu, select additional options and then select the linux-mbp entry with recovery ramdisk.

For further information I'd recommend joining the discord server he wrote it in (link can be found on https://t2linux.org)

[ronnystandtke]

I tested again with the latest Linux kernel in Debian backports (version 5.9.6) and now the apple_bce driver compiles and loads without crashing the kernel and the keyboard, touchpad and sound output works. The webcam and two finger scrolling on the touchpad doesn't seem to work though.
Unfortunately, the macbook12-spi-driver for the touchbar is not yet compatible with the kernel version 5.9, see
roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver#54
The original issue (freezes and crashes) seems to be fixed now. Do you want me to close this issue or leave it open to track the progress with the remaining issues?