Good news for people with hardware that have a 64-bit CPU but unfortunately a 32-bit UEFI! The question was asked here in the forum several times in the last few years and a solution was not in sight, but yesterday a developer I had been in touch with about a year ago on the matter sent me a message, saying that it is now in the latest 14-stable snapshot:
"It's been over a year since the last update, sorry for the long wait and
thank you for your patience.
If you're still interested, the 32-bit UEFI stuff, along with the ACPI
fixes (including a new driver that should fix your remaining warning
messages), was MFC'd into STABLE recently. Which means that they should
be in the upcoming 14.3 release.
You can download a STABLE snapshot here:
https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/14.2
(The directory name is a little misleading, but these are indeed
14-STABLE builds.)
About the RTL8723BS driver, there was a bunch of work done recently to
improve WIFI support on FreeBSD. Though I fear that the RTL8723BS is too
obscure/old to be supported at this point. I'll put it on my "might do
at some point" list, but that's not a guarantee that it will be done
soon (or ever). I hope you understand."
Make sure you only download images from the 27th, previous ones do not have that feature yet. I am also posting my dmesg here and unfortunately, indeed I do not have Wi-Fi and sound support on that laptop. But maybe others here might be luckier with their hardware. So I would like to encourage you to give it a try and report your findings in this thread, please.
Hopefully I am not the only one who is happy about the new ability of FreeBSD to install on hardware with an 32-bit UEFI.
"It's been over a year since the last update, sorry for the long wait and
thank you for your patience.
If you're still interested, the 32-bit UEFI stuff, along with the ACPI
fixes (including a new driver that should fix your remaining warning
messages), was MFC'd into STABLE recently. Which means that they should
be in the upcoming 14.3 release.
You can download a STABLE snapshot here:
https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/14.2
(The directory name is a little misleading, but these are indeed
14-STABLE builds.)
About the RTL8723BS driver, there was a bunch of work done recently to
improve WIFI support on FreeBSD. Though I fear that the RTL8723BS is too
obscure/old to be supported at this point. I'll put it on my "might do
at some point" list, but that's not a guarantee that it will be done
soon (or ever). I hope you understand."
Make sure you only download images from the 27th, previous ones do not have that feature yet. I am also posting my dmesg here and unfortunately, indeed I do not have Wi-Fi and sound support on that laptop. But maybe others here might be luckier with their hardware. So I would like to encourage you to give it a try and report your findings in this thread, please.
Hopefully I am not the only one who is happy about the new ability of FreeBSD to install on hardware with an 32-bit UEFI.