TALK ABOUT A RESPONSIVE DEVELOPER‼ï¸
I received Mike Bombich's response to my problem report less than 24 hours after sending it. I thought I would share his response with FineTunedMac.
Thanks for the report, it has almost completely convinced me that this is not really even worth the effort. Apple's "External Boot" solution is no longer the solution that we grew up with, they've allowed it to languish while making too many changes to macOS too quickly.
- The clones are not exact clones of the source drive. There are kernel extensions, notably SoftRAID 6.0.1, installed on the source drive. The SoftRAID kernel extension is not installed in the clone although it does appear in /Library/StagedExtensions
At the end of the procedure, it's impossible for the volumes to not be identical. Immediately following the clone, however, Apple's APFS replication utility calls upon the bless utility to "personalize" the OS on the destination. This involves code signing the kernel extension cache using a machine-specific identifier stored in the M1's security enclave, and possibly rebuilding the kernel cache (given your observations, I suspect the kernel cache must have been rebuilt). I can't have any influence on this part of the procedure, Apple has wrested control of this from every third-party.
- In order to install a kernel extension it is necessary to set the Security Policy for that particular volume. When I attempt to do that on the clone the system reports “No Administrator Was Found†and does not change the Security Policy for that boot volume. Therefore it is impossible to induce the kernel extension to install.
If you attempt to boot from the volume, you should be prompted to grant administrator rights to one of the users on that volume.
- This one is harder to nail down, but if I leave the cloned drive connected and the computer booted from the source drive I am encountering random system crashes. These crashes typically occur overnight and it appears to happen whether the clone volume is mounted or not.
It could be an overheating issue, but I think it's more likely that these are simply bugs in the "External Boot" solution that Apple hasn't sorted out yet. We were already seeing a lot of issues when people were simply installing macOS onto external devices (specific to M1 Macs, not too many issues on Intel Macs).
- The clone does not appear in System Preferences > Startup Drive, but it does appear as a Startup option.
IN CONCLUSIONWe're not staking the future of our product on the reliability of Apple's External Boot solution. I hate to lose this functionality – frankly it was a huge feature that separated Macs from PCs. But if Apple is going to let it languish like this, we (CCC devs) have to move on. On that note, I'm pretty stoked about some new functionality we have coming in the near future.
At least cloning works albeit it is not fully effective, and limits the usefulness of a clone as a backup alternative. There are a few more tests I want to conduct…
- I have seen the prompt Mike mentioned to grant administrator rights, but it has not bee consistent
- If I grant administrator rights on a clone, can I then change the volume Security Policy?
- If I can change the volume Security Policy, can I successfully install kernel Extensions
- If I get all that working can I clone back to the internal drive without going through a lot of rigamarole?
All of this and I wasn't that much of a fan of clones to start with. 🙄 FWIW I still rely on Time Machine as my primary backup which is why I was so anxious to get the SoftRAID drivers working.
