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FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

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Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#61

Post by duaneb »

boterock wrote: post #5

Some months ago I got FreeBSD running in a Macbook Air, and surprisingly the UEFI boot worked out of the box. I say surprisingly because when I tried, the Linux efiboot didn't work, the only way to boot linux was through GRUB. I had almost everything working (Audio, suspend on close, i3 or gnome) but never got the wifi to work, I even tethered from my android phone to the Macbook and it worked very good. But in the e…

I believe audio over hdmi is also unfinished for recent MacBook pros, which is a deal breaker for me.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#62

Post by duaneb »

BoorishBears wrote: post #44
wwweston wrote: post #17

> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI tha…

The problem for me is OSX still takes less maintenance than Linux and provides a higher quality experience than Linux. I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicat…

I'm surprised git UIs have lock-in power. Of all my development constraints, git is the last place I would have expected to find resistance switching OSs.

But then again, I could never do things in tower as fast as I could on the command line, so I dropped it fairly fast. It's not super useful replacement without an interactive rebase. Nice for viewing history, though.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#63

Post by jsjohnst »

floatboth wrote: post #55
verandaguy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not claiming to be knowledgeable about OS X internals, but... it ships with a hypervisor now? Is it at all similar to BSD jails?

Jails aren't a hypervisor. A jail is just a number in the process table. That's what the hipsters call "containers" these days :-) FreeBSD's hypervisor is called bhyve (and it uses vmm.ko), and xhyve is a port of bhyve to macOS (uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework). There are other things that use Hypervisor.framework too.

> There are other things that use Hypervisor.framework too.

Docker's macOS installer uses it rather than VirtualBox now if memory serves.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#64

Post by duaneb »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #8
ekianjo wrote: post #3

> back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001) The snark was really unnecessary.

I agree, I've been running Arch Linux on my MBP Retina for 2+ years now almost without problems. I bet if the OP tried Linux, they'd be absolutely fine.

Sure, but then they'd have to deal with Linux.

/s

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#65

Post by xutopia »

nimrody wrote: post #32
rangibaby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least for Ubuntu on a 2013 MBP I had to install non-free wifi, everything else Just Worked (tm)

How much battery life do you get from this configuration? macOS is optimized for power. FreeBSD not so much, I believe.

I don’t think I ever had my laptop battery run out on me. To me it’s just not an issue. I’m plugged in 85% of the time.

How do people use their laptops? For me it's almost always at a desk and if not there is always a plug nearby.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#66

Post by Ar-Curunir »

plg wrote: post #48
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I've been running Arch Linux on my MBP Retina for 2+ years now almost without problems. I bet if the OP tried Linux, they'd be absolutely fine.

how is battery life? does close-lid-to-sleep and open-lid-to-wake work?

Yup, works great out of the box.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#67

Post by mpasternacki »

I’m author of that gist (just noticed I have some comments there I need to reply to), still running the setup, now with FreeBSD 12-CURRENT. Tl;dr it generally works, still no wi-fi support. X works fine (running with drm-next-4.7 patches to get external thunderbolt display to work; vanilla kernel works fine with built-in and DVI display, gets confused by Thunderbolt display only). Gave up on pkg because I want to control my build flags, I’m using portmaster now and thinking about setting up poudriere on a bigger server. Feel free to ask if you have any particular questions.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#68

Post by mpasternacki »

mkup wrote: post #40

This tutorial is about FreeBSD 11-CURRENT snapshot 20150111 (pre-release version), so it deals in act II with hybrid UFS/ZFS setup, but FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE supports root-on-ZFS-in-UEFI-mode via standard installer. Release version of boot1.efi loader fully supports ZFS, so small UFS boot partition is no longer needed, and things are much simpler now.

It doesn't work yet with GELI as far as I know, so for encrypted root /boot still needs to be on a separate partition. There was some work to support encrypted /boot, I'm not sure where it stands now, but I'd be very surprised if it supported encrypted ZFS.

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#69

Post by mpasternacki »

rhubarbquid wrote: post #38
95014_refugee wrote: post #10

"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM" This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.

and 2 sentences after describing themselves as someone "whose definition of "fun" includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI." So the author really enjoys debugging boot problems, but a custom kernel in a VM is just too tricky? Is there something I'm missing that makes that way harder than debugging dual boot?

Author here. Debugging dual boot is interesting, debugging virtualbox is not. And I was curious if I can get it running. I just was too lazy to figure it out, I found a more interesting problem to work on. In the end, I stayed in the native FreeBSD install, so there was no motivation to figure out the custom kernel in virtualbox (it is quite simple in bhyve, though)

Re: FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

#70

Post by wwweston »

meekins wrote: post #27
wwweston wrote: post #17

> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI tha…

Homebrew and a Vagrant managed Linux VM depending on the situation. I'm seriously considering moving to Linux next time I'm switching my work laptop.

Any particular software you host your VM in? How easy/hard is it to get the VM networking with the host machine?
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