Triple boot Windows 10 Linux MacOS Mojave on MacBook Pro 15” 2012 on a fusion drive

[Bynsms]

I want to triple boot my 2012 15” classic non retina MacBook Pro (cMBP) with MacOS Mojave Windows 10 and Linux (will decide on the distro later) while making a fusion drive from the 512 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD inside the machine? I’m thinking of partitioning the SSD to 80 GB to Linux 100 to Windows and the rest to the fusion drive and 200 GB of the HDD to exfat and 800 GB to the fusion drive. So approx 330 GB SSD and 800 GB HDD so roughly 1 TB fusion drive for MacOS Mojave, 100 GB SSD partition for windows and 80 GB SSD partition for Linux.

Anyone able to guide me through this? I’m willing to install all from scratch.

Do I have to disable SIP? Should I install High Sierra first and upgrade to Mojave after all is done?

Can I enable SIP after all is done in case I have to disable it?

Anyone has experience with this?

Do I have any limitations coz of the number of partitions?


Thanks a lot in advance for any help and suggestions!

 

[treekram]

I would not use fusion and instead try to manage the macOS split between the SSD and HDD manually. You have a pretty large SSD so that the OS and your home directory ~/Library should fit comfortably on the SSD - to me, these would be the most tricky things to manage if one had a small SSD, say 32GB or 64GB and a HDD.

According to this article, you should not use fusion on drives made up of multiple partitions (search for the word "Warning"). According to this article, Apple warns about this, but they don't provide a link to any Apple reference.
https://www.lifewire.com/setting-up-fusion-drive-mac-2260165

Also, from what I have seen on the web (you can research this further to double-check this), if you do Boot Camp with fusion, Windows will be put on the HDD. If you know how to install Windows without relying on Boot Camp to do it, you probably can get around this.

A small number of people have started to report problems with APFS fusion drives with the later (10.14.4+) Mojave updates.

If you do go fusion, there was one poster who reported the following issue on the 2012 Mini. (The 2012 Mini has similar design to the non-Retina 2012 MBP - they used pretty much the same chips.) The issue reported was that the High Sierra fusion HFS+ drive with Boot Camp was not converted to APFS when installing Mojave (APFS fusion is not available in High Sierra). When using HFS+ fusion in Mojave, the system was very unresponsive. Once the Boot Camp partition was removed and the space reclaimed, the Mojave installer did convert the fusion drive to APFS and the system responded normally. So, if you go the fusion route, it's best to skip High Sierra and do Mojave. (There may be something with Macs with dual-SATA ports vs. iMacs that had the PCIe / SATA ports that accounts for this - this is speculation on my part.)

I don't know about the SIP question - I don't think it will be an issue since I don't think you're doing SIP-prohibited actions.