Re: FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

Scott Long wrote:

> Julian Elischer wrote:
>
>> David Leimbach wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/11/06, *Julian Elischer* <julian_at_elischer.org 
>>> <mailto:julian_at_elischer.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     alan bryan wrote:
>>>
>>>     >I read that the new Intel (x86) Macs use EFI rather
>>>     >than the traditional PC Bios to boot up.  I'm
>>>     >interested in using one of these to multiboot OS X and
>>>     >FreeBSD and am wondering if it is yet known to work or
>>>     >not.  Do any changes need to be made to FreeBSD or
>>>     >should it work out of the box? Thanks for any insight
>>>     >and I know that it may be impossible to fully answer
>>>     >until people get their hands on the hardware but I
>>>     >just wanted to start thinking about the possibilities.
>>>     >
>>>     >
>>>     well if they can boot Darwin I'm sure they can be hacked to boot
>>>     FreeBSD.
>>>     It would probabty require a different bootloader binary.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't see what booting Darwin has to do with booting FreeBSD.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> If they were bastards they could refuse to load anything that wasn't 
>> in some format or didn't
>> decrypt with some public key. I doubt they wouod do that but since 
>> they control the
>> horizontal and the vertical they COULD do it.
>>
>> It is possible that the boot loader sequence may require a stage that 
>> is in some format
>> supported by the apple firmware, depending on how wired down they 
>> have made it.
>>
>
> Geez, please take off the tinfoil hat.  This has been an FAQ since about
> 3 seconds after the word 'Intel' escaped Jobs' lips in June.  Apple has
> quite clearly stated that they will not do anything to lock down the
> hardware from other OS's, just that they won't go out of their way to
> support anything other than OSX.
>
> So, repeat after me: "APPLE IS NOT KILLING KITTENS AND CALLING YOUR
> MOTHER DIRTY NAMES".  A gold star goes to the first person who boots
> FreeBSD on an Intel iMac.

What I thought I said:

"They COULD have done XYZ bad things (see above) but in all probability 
the worst thing we'd
have to do is have a boot loader component (possibly boot0) that 
conforms to some file format,
and that should be relatively simple"

>
> Scott