UEFI, ...

D

DeafFatalBruno

Hi

I am bit of newbie with BSD. Kinda wanna try it for many years, but ended up with Linux servers instead due to some issues at various times.

I ran FreeNAS for a while and kinda liked it, but prefer to use plain FreeBSD, so can do and learn more with it.


What I am trying to understand is what the support in 10 is for UEFI (as this is the only hardware I currently have to run freebsd on). Google doesn't show much. Most posts in that regards (FreeBSD & UEFI) are quite old.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI

This page seem somewhat recent, I am not sure if that is fully up to date?

Does that mean no UEFI support as of 10 yet? ( I don't understand this page well enough to judge, a few items are still marked as in progress, I just assume that means nothing functional yet..., or does it mean that still some work is to be done, but there is enough support in 10 to get it to work ? )

Is there any way for a FreeBSD beginner to get UEFI to work and should I just give up and use other distros, till FreeBSD is ready?

Thanks for any advice.
 
Installing on a UEFI machine is on my to-do list, but I've been too busy to try. Rumor has it that it works, but you have to enable traditional BIOS-style boot loading in the UEFI (I think that's called legacy boot). On the one UEFI machine I've tried it on (IBM x3650 M4), I can verify that it DOESN'T work if you forget to enable legacy boot. I tried it with FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE for 64-bit machines.
 
Legacy boot on UEFI works, I did that on a new motherboard a few days ago. UEFI gives BIOS writers even more of an opportunity to show how much they hate humanity with lots of conflicting, poorly-named, and badly-categorized options, so plan on spending some time trying options that don't seem to be relevant. This was a Gigabyte board, which was marginally less difficult to set up than an Asus motherboard.
 
UEFI legacy boot works, booting GPT from UEFI does not(atleast not for me).
 
zspider said:
UEFI legacy boot works, booting GPT from UEFI does not(atleast not for me).
Click to expand...
Works fine here, on multiple machines. UEFI actually must support GPT so I find it strange it doesn't work for you. Have you tried updating the UEFI/BIOS?
 
SirDice said:
zspider said:
UEFI legacy boot works, booting GPT from UEFI does not(atleast not for me).
Click to expand...
Works fine here, on multiple machines. UEFI actually must support GPT so I find it strange it doesn't work for you. Have you tried updating the UEFI/BIOS?
Click to expand...

It didn't work a year ago, I updated my BIOS several months ago and a couple of weeks ago I set up a fresh install and attempted to use GPT and it still didn't work. The machine is an ASUS K55VD.

Sorry for my mistake, I assumed based on the UEFI page that it wasn't quite ready yet.
 
Thanks for the answers, ... I need to check, I didn't notice a legacy boot option in my UEFI BIOS.
It's Asrock for AMD APU. Will give it a shot if that options exists.

Some Linux distros I tried had trouble with the graphics on the APU CPUs (I tried 5 different distros in the last week),

I mainly want to run command line via ssh, but here and there a graphic desktop helps. so will see how FreeBSD handles the APU, if I can get past the UEFI issue.
The last 9.x version I tried , didn't want to boot.
Thanks.
 
DeafFatalBruno said:
Thanks for the answers, ... I need to check, I didn't notice a legacy boot option in my UEFI bios.
Click to expand...
It's sometimes called CSM or Compatibility Support Module. On some implementations you need to enable that first before you can enable "Legacy boot".
 
Thanks! One thing I def noticed very positively: the responsiveness of this forum is much better than I experienced at any Linux community so far! I am very impressed! thanks to all responders, I never expected so many answer for a smaller size community such as BSD, ... even more motivation to get BSD to work, ... ( I professionally work with QNX to some degree,.. and I always kinda like the Unix architecture over Linux, and while that may not matter that much once something works - I am neither to biased towards one or the other, ... in the end I like the BSD path emotionally ;) )

PS: except I get PMs about not formatting my messages correctly (will see if this one passes), ... didn't know that non capitalisation of BSD gets you into trouble here, .... ;)
 
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