Installing FreeBSD on a mid 2007 macbook 32-bit EFI only?

K

Kurko2468

Has anyone had any luck installing FreeBSD (32 bit or 64 bit) on a 32-bit EFI system?
Supposedly on https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI it says that 32 bit EFI is not yet supported, but Id like to ask if someone has some insight about how to get it working. I already have on this laptop a fully working 64bit Arch Linux and I want to have additionally FreeBSD on dual boot, with 32-bit EFI grub already installed and working on a EFI partition.
Also, since I already have a working example on Linux, I could help developing 32 bit EFI support in FreeBSD.
 
Kurko2468 said:
Also, since I already have a working example on Linux, I could help developing 32 bit EFI support in FreeBSD.
Click to expand...
Any news on this? The necessity of having a 32 bit EFI for FreeBSD goes much further than wanting to install it on old Macs:

This affects everybody that has some piece of hardware with the Intel Atom Bay Trail Chip, like me. I have a Notebook with that with Windows 10 32 bit preinstalled, but after some Windows update the sound chip is not recognized anymore, nor is a microSD card that I have.
I would really like to install something else on that Notebook, but with that 32 bit EFI I have not found a viable solution yet. An attempt to modify some xubuntu image with some fancy file to convert the iso and obtain an image with 32 bit EFI was not successful.
I tried a Fedora 35 live stick and it boots fine, the wifi is easily connected, but I think the sound chip does not work, apart from the fact that you can not try anything, like play a youtube video or an mp3, probably to codec issues. Also I don't like Gnome3 and I don't think it's a good idea if you only have 2 GB of RAM.
Also tried a 32 bit Sparky Linux which also boots into live mode, visually it seems that the sound chip works, but there I there I have no wifi and I don't like LXDE either.
So unless I do not find a Linux distribution where I can check in live mode if everything works, I will not perform an install to lose my Windows 10.
But what I would really like is to have FreeBSD be able to install on a 32 bit EFI. There several threads in this forum by other people with the same problem, but it looks like FreeBSD is still unable to install on an 32 bit EFI.
 
grahamperrin said:
Can you link to some? Thanks.
Click to expand...
Another one is here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...-32bit-efi-not-bios-legacy.70665/#post-553398

If you put "32 bit efi" in the search bar of this forum, you will find more threads that deal more or less with the same thing. Personally I am not interested in old MacBooks, but I think this feature of having FreeBSD being able to install on hardware with a 32 bit efi is interesting for a lot of older Laptops that came with a so called Intel Bay Trail Atom Processor. I think many of them were issued with Windows 8 at the time, which has that capability.
 
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