Rui Paulo’s blog

Well, EFI is nothing new, but, currently, we only support EFI booting on FreeBSD/ia64. Before Apple started shipping MacBooks with EFI, there would be a small interest in adding EFI boot loader to anything but ia64. But now that there are thousands of Intel Macs, interest has risen.

I’ve been asked by several people to make available a patch for my recent take on the FreeBSD/i386 EFI boot loader. I’m also making available binaries for i386.

So, if you have a Core Duo/Solo MacBook (Core 2 won’t work yet, sorry) and want to try it out, do the following:

• Install rEFIt.
• Download http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/boot.tgz.
• Extract boot.tgz to your / HFS+ partition (don’t worry, rEFIt will find it).
• Reboot.
• Select /boot/loader.efi from the rEFIt boot prompt.

One thing worth playing with is the ‘col’ command I just added. It basically changes the screen resolution. So here’s your chance to have something super leet: a FreeBSD boot loader at 1280×800 or more! Also, EFI will make your HFS+ partition avaiable to the boot loader, so doing an ‘ls’ will really show your files.

Oh, the source code? Here: http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/efi.tgz.

One final thing: I’m still working on kernel booting, so don’t expect it to work.

Something I’ve wanted to do for sometime was to boot FreeBSD on my MacBook via EFI. EFI is a firmware standard for BIOS and OS writers to deal with. Basically, it replaces the good old MBR booting scheme and is capable of much more, namely, all the real mode restrictions are gone, TCP support in the firmware and, if you write a driver, you can have UFS, ZFS, whateverFS support on the firmware itself

Apparently, I couldn’t make it work for last years’s Summer of Code, but now something works. I was able to boot loader.efi on my MacBook and see a “FreeBSD/i386″ boot message. Yay! Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in (probably) the FORTH library and it sometimes hangs or, if it doesn’t hang, it displays a lot of garbage.

So, you have a MacBook and want to try this out? Great! Here’s the procedure:

• Grab loader.efi from http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/.
• Install rEFIt.
• Copy loader.efi to, for example, /efi/freebsd/loader.efi.
• Reboot and select loader.efi from the rEFIt boot menu.

Don’t expect nothing fancy though.

UPDATE: the bug is not in the FORTH library as I originally though.

I’ve been hacking the NetBSD lii(4) driver so that it works under FreeBSD. This driver is most notably found on the Asus line of sub-notebooks, Eee PC. So far, so good. I did not finish the porting yet, but the mechanical changes are mostly done.
The reason for this is that I bought an Eee PC 701, hence I need this driver, :-), although I haven’t touched my Eee PC yet (it’s at my parents house). But I will do the first testing this weekend.

If you have this hardware and would like to help with the effort, please email me.

The effort is being revision controlled at //depot/user/rpaulo/lii/.

I’ve been running Mac OS X on my MacBook for some time mostly because I needed a very stable platform and good power management for college. But now that college is over, I decided to install FreeBSD again.

After a few hours of compiling/installing/configuring, I booted up Xorg. Of course, I never created a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file because new Xorg versions can auto-detect the hardware. After a few seconds of fluxbox usage, Xorg crashes. WTH? I tried to start it up again. The graphics card registers are in an unexpected state (that’s what the Xorg intel driver tells me). Double WTH?

Only a reboot fixed it.

The problem was that Xorg was using a 24 or 32 bit depth. It works fine with 16 bit.

Unfortunately, this is the “state-of-the-art” when it comes to Xorg and I’m so tired of it that I got back to Mac OS X. I’ve been enduring XFree/Xorg/<insert crappy application here> pain for some years now and I’m only 22 years old. I can try to fix FreeBSD, but I don’t have time to fix all the other applications.

As you may have guessed from the title, this means that I won’t devote my time to the FreeBSD on the MacBook project and, instead, I will dedicate myself to other FreeBSD projects.