Re: FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

On 1/15/06, Scott Long <scottl_at_samsco.org> wrote:
> David Leimbach wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 1/14/06, *Scott Long* <scottl_at_samsco.org <mailto:scottl_at_samsco.org>>
> > wrote:
> >
> >     Tim Kientzle wrote:
> >      > Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> >      >
> >      >>> iMac, download the EFI spec from www.intel.com
> >     <http://www.intel.com>, open up the existing
> >      >>
> >      >>
> >      >> For the lazy / impatient / bad searchers:
> >      >> http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/
> >      >
> >      >
> >      > On a related note, anyone know about any VMWare or Xen or other
> >     similar
> >      > virtual machine environment for Mac/Intel?  (FreeBSD on Virtual
> >     PC on
> >      > Rosetta sounds very scary... ;-(
> >      >
> >      > Tim
> >      >
> >
> >     A meta-question to this is whether it will be possible to compile and
> >     boot OpenDarwin on these x86 machines, like you can with the PPC ones.
> >     If you can then I see no reason why Darwin couldn't be Xen-ified and
> >     serve as a Domain-0 host.
> >
> >     Scott
> >
> >
> >
> > I can't think of why opendarwin wouldn't work on a machine apple
> > actually supports hardware-wise.  Then again I didn't see any new
> > releases of software on opendarwin.org <http://opendarwin.org> relating
> > to 10.4.4 yet :).
> >
> > I know the guy at apple who used to make these releases though and he's
> > been working on a cool build system for building the whole system from
> > the tarred snapshot releases from time to time.  I used to test this
> > stuff for him.
> >
> > It will take interested people with actual time to do the Xen port of
> > course.  I'm not sure how much work a Xen host port is compared to a Xen
> > guest though.
> >
> > Dave
> >
>
>
> I guess I should clarify myself a bit.  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that
> OpenDarwin will boot on the Intel machines eventually, even if the
> source isn't available today.  What I'm really wondering about is
> whether OpenDarwin will be able to support OSX on those machines.
> And yeah, Kevin has done a good job with the OpenDarwin build system.
> It still has a long ways to go before it's as nice as the FreeBSD one,
> but it's better than it used to be =-)
>
> Scott
>

The bless man page for Mac OS X Intel reveals much about changing the
efi boot "thingy".

Seems that's where you'd want to put the FreeBSD loader... but that
means it'll live on HFS+, and then we might want the FreeBSD loader to
be able to boot Mac OS X too.

Got some friends who've got their intel macs already... we'll see if
they get experimental or not.

I'm really not caring for dual boot as much as I am hoping for
something like VMWare on Mac OS X so I can host FBSD and others there.
 I guess that takes EFI out of the equation at that point too.  At
some point... having to reboot kind of sucks :)

Dave