Dream Setup

Argentum said:
I think after all there are two schools of philosophy - first (I would call it old school) which says that one should pick a right hardware to run his/her application; second which says that an application should run on all hardware. In this respect the operating system with user-land and ports is an application.

Personally I am an old school person (maybe this is also related to my birth date ;)).
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Ah, this is really the age-old question of chicken and egg. OS is not an application, it's the layer between userland and ports application and bare metal. An Epyc 7703 may be ideal for running a web server, but if you skip the OS selection, and go with whatever, you can end up with Windows XP as the layer between the Epyc and Apache - and end up with crappy results.
 
astyle said:
Ah, this is really the age-old question of chicken and egg. OS is not an application, it's the layer between userland and ports application and bare metal. An Epyc 7703 may be ideal for running a web server, but if you skip the OS selection, and go with whatever, you can end up with Windows XP as the layer between the Epyc and Apache - and end up with crappy results.
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Agree, the pure kernel is not called an application, but FreeBSD (as we all know) is more than just a kernel. Shell is an application already...
 
Argentum said:
Agree, the pure kernel is not called an application, but FreeBSD (as we all know) is more than just a kernel. Shell is an application already...
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FreeBSD is actually just the kernel. sh(1) and ports(7) are actually available for just about all of the platforms that FreeBSD supports. So, it's not really possible to get away from selecting the right hardware for the kernel to run on. But once that step is done - userland and ports can run just about anywhere.
 
astyle said:
FreeBSD is actually just the kernel. sh(1) and ports(7) are actually available for just about all of the platforms that FreeBSD supports. So, it's not really possible to get away from selecting the right hardware for the kernel to run on. But once that step is done - userland and ports can run just about anywhere.
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Let's say kernel is OK, but bootloader does not work well with a specific hardware (which happened to me some time ago). Loader is a separate application. Independent of kernel. Can be built also independently. Eventually I had to replace the hardware to get it working...
 
Argentum said:
Let's say kernel is OK, but bootloader does not work well with a specific hardware (which happened to me some time ago). Loader is a separate application. Independent of kernel. Can be built also independently. Eventually I had to replace the hardware to get it working...
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I would think that the bootloader is just the first part of the kernel that gets activated. Well, I'd have to read the Handbook's section on booting more carefully to provide a more solid reply.
Jose said:
Hopefully no one will engage in high school level debate tactics.
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Nice link! Unfortunately, in the field of computer expertise, something that on the surface looks like a red herring, can very well turn out to be THE problem to address to get the rig working. And it takes people being more or less on the same page to be able to understand something like that.
 
astyle said:
I would think that the bootloader is just the first part of the kernel that gets activated. Well, I'd have to read the Handbook's section on booting more carefully to provide a more solid reply.
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No. It is not part of kernel, can be built completely independently and also 13.0 loader can be used with older kernels. I am talking about:
Code: 
root@Rhodium ~# file /boot/loader.efi
/boot/loader.efi: PE32+ executable (EFI application) x86-64, for MS Windows

To build it
Code: 
cd /usr/src/stand/
make
 
grahamperrin said:
At least two of the (Insight) top five best-selling computers from the world's second largest PC vendor. Details linked from page 2.
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One of which you happen to have, right? So the Freebsd project should focus on making your computer work? How many other people have complained?
 
Jose said:
One of which you happen to have, right? So the Freebsd project should focus on making your computer work? How many other people have complained?
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Well, I have seen such thing - a major PC manufacturer's product not being able to boot FreeBSD. That is not the problem of FreeBSD, but their product not following the standards and being Windows oriented. Discrete motherboards and smaller brand products are usually better...
 
Argentum said:
Well, I have seen such thing - a major PC manufacturer's product not being able to boot FreeBSD. That is not the problem of FreeBSD, but their product not following the standards and being Windows oriented. Discrete motherboards and smaller brand products are usually better...
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And I'm a little sad that the dev who was being so helpful went quiet all of a sudden. I would take stab at creating a debug loader if I had access to the hardware, but that's the rub, you often don't in a small project with a limited budget.
 
Off the top of my head, IIRC from following the email lists (which I stumbled on while waiting for 13-RELEASE to finally show up), FreeBSD devs tend to use secondhand Lenovo laptops... But that's a random bit of info that somehow just stuck with me for no apparent reason while browsing the email lists earlier this year. And even on these forums, someone (Geezer, I think!) mentioned that FreeBSD does better with Lenovo. This is partly why I like pushing the idea of doing your homework before splurging on a laptop, especially if you plan to install FreeBSD on it.

But man, this thread has taken on a life of its own... not a bad thing, IMHO, that can be of use to lots of people beyond initial participants. :)
 
astyle said:
Off the top of my head, IIRC from following the email lists (which I stumbled on while waiting for 13-RELEASE to finally show up), FreeBSD devs tend to use secondhand Lenovo laptops... But that's a random bit of info that somehow just stuck with me for no apparent reason while browsing the email lists earlier this year. And even on these forums, someone (Geezer, I think!) mentioned that FreeBSD does better with Lenovo. This is partly why I like pushing the idea of doing your homework before splurging on a laptop, especially if you plan to install FreeBSD on it.
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I can confirm that old Lenovo works perfectly with FreeBSD, including WiFi.
 
Jose said:
You submitted a bug report because a computer you don't have doesn't boot?
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Yes. There's logic. Please see, for example:

old.reddit.com

HP ProBook 440 G7

There's a possibility of me gaining use of this notebook (no other): [HP ProBook 440 G7](https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c06474914) * [HP...
old.reddit.com old.reddit.com

Jose said:
How do you plan to verify it's fixed?
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Testing.

When the opportunity arises, as a variety of HP and other computers pass through my hands.
 
Jose said:
So you didn't get it but you know it won't boot? Or you did get it and it doesn't boot, but it's not yours?
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I did not want an HP ProBook 440 G7 because I knew that neither -RELEASE nor -CURRENT could boot it.

Then (amongst other things in the bug reports) came the test with the HP ProBook 440 G8. Again, not mine.

Then the HP ProBook 450 G8. Again, not mine.

It's now reasonable for me to make a business case for a beefed-up (but not exotic) HP that FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT can boot, with copy_staging disable (that 13.0-RELEASE can not), however the case can not include use of FreeBSD. Maybe a ProBook 450 G8. I'm in no rush.


My situation aside: copy_staging disable is not a workaround for neither 13.⋯ nor 14.0-CURRENT booting this mid-2007 computer: <https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/82243/>
 
grahamperrin : Let's see if I got you straight here... there's a list of HP laptops (with some nice specs) that you like, and are considering getting one of them - if there's a decent chance that they will work with FreeBSD. The hardware specs are nice enough to motivate you to do your homework for each and every one of the laptops. And that per-laptop homework extends to filing bug reports on 14-CURRENT.

Either that, or you're trying to unload some 7-year-old laptops, and want to be able to guarantee that they will in fact run FreeBSD 13-RELEASE or 14-CURRENT.

This is just a couple of assumptions that I'm making here, based on your talking about how you don't own the bespoke laptops, but are researching their compatibility with FreeBSD anyway.
 
Thanks,

astyle said:
… HP laptops (with some nice specs) that you like, …
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September 2020: "There's a possibility of me gaining use of this notebook (no other)" was when, if I recall correctly, the HP ProBook 440 G7 was standard issue at my place of work.

Non-standard would have required a business case. July 2021:

grahamperrin said:
… I can not make a business case for FreeBSD-compatible hardware. …
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More accurately:

grahamperrin said:
Windows 10 is a requirement, and the hardware that's normally given (most often: HP ProBook 440 G7) runs Windows 10 very well.

I can't make a case for alternative hardware based on a personal preference for something other than Windows.
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There's more, but essentially:
  • if I do not attempt to make a business case, what I like is irrelevant – I'll be given a standard issue HP, which FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE can not boot
  • I'd like additional memory, and additional storage
  • I'll make a case for additional memory
– and on whatever I receive, I'll run FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT.
 
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