FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

[Jung-uk Kim]

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 04:26 pm, 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.

If it has something called CSM, it should be able to boot FreeBSD:

http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/64E7EA353646669ECA2570F50012430B

In fact, Intel has been using EFI on recent motherboards such as 
SE7520AF2:

http://www.intel.com/design/servers/boards/se7520af2/index.htm

They didn't say it on the web page but it does have EFI.

If the Apple hardware doesn't have CSM, then we have to make 
'EFI-aware' boot loader chain and add EFI interface (instead of vm86 
bios calls) to i386 kernel. :-(

Jung-uk Kim

PS: Sorry to bring up Linux here but Linux won't have the problem 
because Intel has added EFI support for i386:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=105848983307228&w=2

and EFI LILO (for both i386 and ia64) is here:

http://elilo.sourceforge.net/

Just FYI...