Questions about FreeBSD on a Mac Mini

[Nathan Whitehorn]

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?
> 2. Open Firmware doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions so there's no
> reasonable way to boot an installed system is there?
>
>   
While the installer does not currently provide a partitioning mechanism 
or bootloader installation facility, the operating system itself does 
have this capability, and you can also do it by hand (e.g. from OS X). 
The gpart utility is capable of partioning APM disks from the command 
line, and there is a boot loader image (/boot/boot1.hfs) available on 
-CURRENT that you can dd to an extra 800 K partition to get a boot 
sector that OF will understand. You can also partition from OS X and 
copy the loader (/boot/loader) to an HFS partition at that time.
> 3. Altivec is not supported so there'll be a performance hit when using
> FreeBSD?
>   
This is remedied in -CURRENT and will be merged to -STABLE in a week and 
a half, barring any reports of problems.
-Nathan