Single boot EFI Mac install

Carsten Mattner carstenmattner at googlemail.com
Wed Mar 7 19:15:05 UTC 2012


On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 6:13 PM, George Hartzell <hartzell at alerce.com> wrote:
> Carsten Mattner writes:
>  > Has anyone successfully installed FreeBSD as a single boot system
>  > on an EFI Mac?
>
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a single boot system.
>
> I have Mac Pro that runs Mac OS on on disk (actually a pair in a
> software RAID) and FreeBSD from another pair (gmirror RAID).  I
> suspect that I could pull the MacOS disks from the system and it would
> happily run as a FreeBSD only machine.
>
> I believe that I set up the disks using the mac tools and then did an
> install from a DVD, but it's been a while.
>
> The only particularly trick-ish part is that I had to partition the
> FreeBSD disks using MBR style partitions, that's (part of?) what the
> Mac firmware uses to decide to turn on it's PC-style BIOS emulation,
> which FreeBSD needs before it can get itself going.  GPT partitions
> will not work.  Every once in a while the machine hangs at boot time
> but I haven't seen it in a while.
>
> What happens if you just throw a FreeBSD DVD in the drive?

I'm pretty sure I can install FreeBSD.

The real question is: Are there EFI bootable FreeBSD images?
rEFIt works but cannot be convinced to stop delaying the boot
process by ~20 seconds (even after deleting PRAM and bless'ing
the partition). That's why I've been looking for native (EFI) boot options.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list