Installing Gentoo on a 2019 T2 Mac Pro with ZFS

t2linux (CC-BY-SA-4.0) It’s nearly impossible to buy reasonably priced compute hardware in the current market. Consumer memory has regressed to 2009 prices and high-end video card compute has skyrocketed12. While looking around for DDR4 RAM and systems on eBay, I discovered 2019 Mac Pro units at seemingly reasonable prices. Their value dropped as Apple abandoned the Intel architecture. Although Apple released a version of this model with the newer Apple Silicon, it couldn’t even utilize the video cards from the previous generation3, signaling that the Mac Pro was a dead-end platform. However, even with it being a 2019 machine with DDR4 and PCI Gen3, it was still very reasonably priced in today’s market. I decided to buy one of these and see if I could turn it into a Gentoo server, specifically to house my GPUs and use for agentic workloads at a reasonable price. I ran into quite a few challenges, but did get a fully working system in the end despite Apple’s best effort to create more…