How to boot FreeBSD 10.2 on a MacBook Pro 7,2?

[Ortomala Lokni]

Objective
Obtain a full installation of FreeBSD 10.2 on a MacBookPro 7,2.

Hardware

• Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4Ghz, 3Mb L2 Cache,
• 4Gb Memory,
• NVidia MCP89 AHCI SATA controller.

What has been done
The rEFInd 0.10.0 boot manager is installed and provide an EFI menu from which a FreeBSD-RELEASE 10.2 amd64 memstick image is launched.

An access to the loader(8) is provided, from which some parameters like disabling the ACPI support can be tweaked.
set hint.acpi.0.disabled=1

Result
The boot process hangs on the following console output

Starting bootx64.efi
Using load options ''

>> FreeBSD EFI boot block
Loader path: /boot/loader.efi
Consoles: EFI console
Image base: 0xbfe58000
EFI version: 1.10
EFI Firmware: Apple (rev 1.10)

FreeBSD/amd64 EFI loader, Revision 1.1
(root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org, Weg Aug 12 15:21:04 UTC 2015)
Loading /boot/defaults/load.conf
/boot/kernel/kernel text=0xfc8de8 data=0x1283b0+207880 syms=[0x8+0x145350+0x8+0x15fe20]

[37m [44mBooting... [m <==With non printable characters inside
Start @ 0xffffffff802dfc70

Questions

• How to boot FreeBSD 10.2 on a MacBookPro 7,2?
• Is the NVidia MCP89 AHCI SATA controller a problem?
• Is ACPI a problem?
• How to obtain more debugging information?

Known actual state
The FreeBSD wiki on MacBook says:

Recent MacBook Pro and Mac Mini with NVIDIA MCP89 cannot find SATA drives. Linux added a workaround (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15923) and we may need a similar hack until correct fixes are found.

and there is a patch

Do not force AHCI mode on NVIDIA MCP89 SATA controllers. Recent Apple
Mac with this chipset does not initialize AHCI mode unless it is started
from EFI loader. However, legacy ATA mode works.

Submitted by: jkim@ (original version)
Approved by: re (kib)
MFC after: 1 week

Already included in FreeBSD 10.2

Resources

• There is a related question here: FreeBSD 8.1 on MacBook 5,2
• And an interesting documentation about boot troubleshooting there: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting
• There is a related unix stackexchange question

 

[Vinicius Agassi]

4 Steps

1 - Virtualize a BSD in Mac OS System
2 - Convert Virtualized HDD (vdi) to .img
3 - Burn .img in a HDD partition
4 - Start & Enjoy

 

[Ortomala Lokni]

Yes, you are right. I already did it.

But I would like to install FreeBSD directly on the macbook hardware.

 

[Vinicius Agassi]

Yes, the Virtual Machines create a archive.vdi or archive.vmc.
You need convert this archive to .img and then, you can burn this image on HDD.

 

[Atsuri]

OP, have you tried running FreeBSD from a DVD? For me FreeBSD would boot much better from a DVD on average.

Also, I have the very same MacBook Pro and there are known problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers and the nVidia card on this laptop. The GeForce 320M is one of the rare devices not properly supported by nVidia's drivers and problems with it were never addressed. Unfortunately, it is also related to Apple's UEFI setup. There is a workaround, though maybe it's not needed for FreeBSD?

Best of luck!