Re: FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

On 1/11/06, Julian Elischer <julian_at_elischer.org> 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.
>

EFI has a pretty interesting specification we can read about.  Unless
they've done something exceedingly funky to it, I think it should be
pretty easy to boot other OSes with it.

> >
> > However, since FreeBSD boots on IA64 using the FreeBSD bootloader for
> > IA64, I *hope* it won't be much work to port whatever changes that
> > requires to IA32.
>
>
> On apple hardware?
> I haven't heard this..

There is no IA64 apple hardware and likely never will be [Itanium].

I think you may have thought I was talking about x86-64 or AMD64/EM64T.

EFI was originally deployed on IA64 years ago and FreeBSD has
supported it at at least some point.  Also my fellow L4 developers
have used the FreeBSD EFI-enabled bootloader to load L4 programs.

That's all I was referring to, I didn't mean to imply anyone has run
FreeBSD on Apple intel hardware.

Dave