FreeBSD on Intel Macs?

[Doug Rabson]

On 11 Jan 2006, at 22:05, David Leimbach wrote:

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

When I wrote the EFI bootloader for ia64, I spent a small amount of  
time trying to make it possible to port to an i386 EFI environment. I  
reckon it would only take a day or two to do the port. If someone  
donates a nice new 20" iMac to me, I'll even do the work :-)