Single boot EFI Mac install

[George Hartzell]

Carsten Mattner writes:
 > Has anyone successfully installed FreeBSD as a single boot system
 > on an EFI Mac?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a single boot system.

I have Mac Pro that runs Mac OS on on disk (actually a pair in a
software RAID) and FreeBSD from another pair (gmirror RAID).  I
suspect that I could pull the MacOS disks from the system and it would
happily run as a FreeBSD only machine.

I believe that I set up the disks using the mac tools and then did an
install from a DVD, but it's been a while.

The only particularly trick-ish part is that I had to partition the
FreeBSD disks using MBR style partitions, that's (part of?) what the
Mac firmware uses to decide to turn on it's PC-style BIOS emulation,
which FreeBSD needs before it can get itself going.  GPT partitions
will not work.  Every once in a while the machine hangs at boot time
but I haven't seen it in a while.

What happens if you just throw a FreeBSD DVD in the drive?

g.