Dual booting with OSX without bootcamp

[Vincent Hoffman]

 Hi all,
            Work has kindly supplied a shiny new macbook pro (6,2) so
I've re-partitioned it (OSX's grow/shrink partitions/filesystems online
is handy) and now have an EFI partition (hidden,) OSX partition, FreeBSD
/ partition, ZFS partition for the rest  and a swap partition. I've
stuck with GPT to avoid reinstalling and the fiddly process that is
installing anything but windows via bootcamp without trashing the
system. FreeBSD was installed by using the DVD with the livefs,
Partitioning of free space done with gpart, and install done with the
shell scripts (in /dist/8.1-RELEASE/{kernel,base,whatever}  adapted from
the instructions here
http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/3/20/installing-freebsd-onto-a-usb-stick
)

    The problem is booting it, my initial hope was that rEFIt would just
work, but no joy. Next I looked for an EFI loader for freebsd and found
http://blogs.freebsdish.org/rpaulo/2008/09/03/so-you-want-to-test-the-freebsdi386-efi-boot-loader/
but it still wont quite boot a kernel so no joy. Next came grub2 as this
will boot freebsd and also has EFI support, however the EFI support
doesnt support FreeBSD, so I cant find a way to boot . So currently I
can only boot FreeBSD by booting a grub2 CDROM, tellit it to look at the
config file on my mac partition, then booting freebsd using that, If
anyone has a better suggestion I'd welcome it.
   
    Other than that it seems to be working ok, no wireless support as
its a broadcom 43224 which doesn't seem to be supported, however I see
that broadcom have just opensourced their linux drivers (including for
the 43224) so maybe that will open the way to more support in the BSDs
too.  In the mean time I'll try ndiswrapper or just use a usb device, I
may try take it up to 9-CURRENT so i get atp(4) and see if anything else
relevant has been improved.

    If anyone else has a simpler way of booting (without needing to use
bootcamp/the fakembr etc as I'm happy to never have to use
fdisk/bsdlabel again ;) then I'd be interested to hear it, I did see if
i could use grub2efi to boot grub2 (non efi), or use rEFIt to boot grub2
(non efi) from a file to avoid the cdrom but no joy.

Vince