FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

[Scott Long]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

You're spreading FUD, even if you're doing it in a polite way.  Buy an 
iMac, download the EFI spec from www.intel.com, open up the existing 
FreeBSD EFI bootloader code, compare, compile, enjoy.

Scott