FreeBSD with Win7 and UEFI

[Dale Scott]

> On Dec 28, 2014, at 2:56 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sun, December 28, 2014 1:40 pm, Warren Block wrote:
>>> On Sun, 28 Dec 2014, Christian Baer wrote:
>>> 
>>> This is a little redundant, but I really want to make this clear...
>>> 
>>> My motherboard is a Supermicro X10SAT. When the system starts, I can
>>> press
>>> F12 which lets me choose the boot device (basicly like in the BIOS
>>> setup, but
>>> an a temporary basis). This is a *motherboard* function, this is not a
>>> boot
>>> manager from any OS. The motherboard recognises both Windows (list item:
>>> "Windows boot manager") and FreeBSD (list item: "EFI OS").
>>> 
>>> I have seen no other boot manager after the installation nor did I see
>>> any
>>> chance to choose/configure/check one during the installation of FreeBSD.
>>> The
>>> handbook in rather silent about this subject too, which is quite a
>>> surprise
>>> to me. When I started out with Linux, everything was about being able to
>>> coexist with Windows on a single machine. I switched to FreeBSD a little
>>> later. My first FreeBSD CDs were of v3.3 (that was 1999 and I am feeling
>>> very
>>> old right about now). The FreeBSD boot manager of back then wasn't as
>>> pretty
>>> as the one supplied with SuSE at the time but it did the same thing.
>>> 
>>> Is this an EFI thing or have the priorities shifted?
>> 
>> UEFI is a whole new game, utterly different from what came before.  And
>> FreeBSD's UEFI support is new.  As far as I know, it has no provision
>> for multibooting in UEFI.  Code to do that would be welcome, it's been
>> difficult just to get the current UEFI support.
>> 
>> Your boot menu suggests that Windows 7 is installed for standard BIOS
>> booting.  The easiest way to deal with this is to reinstall FreeBSD for
>> standard BIOS booting also, with an MBR format.  Then you can install
>> the boot0 multiboot program, but it really doesn't offer anything that
>> the BIOS boot menu does not already have.
>> 
>> Please also consider running FreeBSD as a VM with one of the many
>> virtualization options.  That has many advantages over multiboot setups.
> 
> There is a big difference: in last case you have the machine running
> Windows 7. Just out of curiosity: do _you_ have the same level of trust to
> Windows 7/8 system as you do to FreeBSD? If yes, why at all would you go
> into trouble running FreeBSD? Just curious (no offense to anyone/anything
> intended ;-)
> 
> Valeri

For me, it's about how FreeBSD enables building and experimenting with systems of applications in ways that wouldn't be possible on Windows (arguably from a pragmatic perspective, not necessarily technically).

Dale