Questions about FreeBSD on a Mac Mini

[Horst Günther Burkhardt III]

On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 19:13 +0000, Ananda Samaddar wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> I'm a prospective FreeBSD user and I've already done a bit of research
> on the website, docs and mailing lists.  I do have a few questions,
> most of them are for confirmation rather than anything else so here
> goes:
> 
> 1. It's not possible to use the installer to partition your disk as
> fdisk doesn't work is this true?

The Mac OS X Disk Utility is ideal for this purpose, also the Debian Net
Install CD or the Finnix PPC LiveCD.

> 2. Open Firmware doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions so there's no
> reasonable way to boot an installed system is there?

You use a small HFS partition, just needs to be 512KB or so, to boot the
UFS partition on. It's a little extra work to configure, but once it's
done you just leave it alone and it works perfectly.

> 3. Altivec is not supported so there'll be a performance hit when using
> FreeBSD?

8.0-CURRENT as of a few days ago has AltiVec support in kernel, so
that's no longer an issue if you're willing to be our guinea pig ;)

> The above issues are quite serious impediments in my opinion so I hope
> I'm wrong on these issues.  Please let me know what the situation is
> and how FreeBSD performs on PPC in general.

In short, I think you'll find that while the issues you iterated above
are slightly problematic, they are hardly insurmountable. I had a bit of
trouble configuring FreeBSD the first time round, but it runs rock-solid
on my Power Macintosh G4, and boots in fifteen seconds from OFW to login
prompt using a custom kernel.

FreeBSD performance on PowerPC is exactly the same as on any other
platform of comparable computing power. A lot depends on what you want
to do with it. 

The only issue I've found, (or at least suspect, and Peter Grehan
suspects I may be on to something), is that sed(1) can sometimes behave
oddly, which can screw up makefiles that depend on it sometimes. But
you're not likely to run across one of those until it's fixed, if you
take your time to get acquainted with the wonderfully rich OS that is
FreeBSD before you tinker ;)

(my expressions are no longer regular)

Happy BSD'ing! 

-- Horst.
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