EFI

Yeah well, it happened. In my last post I was excited to get back to a BSD UNIX (FreeBSD) for my laptop, I thought I had fought the worse when rebuilding kernel and world in order to have a working DRM module for the Intel Iris 6100 that is bundled with this MacBook Pro generation. But I was wrong. None of the BSDs around had support for the BCM43602 chip that provides WiFi to the laptop. What’s the point of a laptop without WiFi…

It is possible to run FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro from an USB drive. To achieve this, we will first prepare the USB drive from a GNU/Linux machine and make it UEFI friendly:

# apt-get install parted
# parted /dev/sdc
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart ESP fat32 1MiB 513MiB
(parted) set 1 boot on
(parted) quit

From there, install FreeBSD as you would for exmaple using the kvm virtual machine hypervisor on the GNU/Linux machine. Answer “yes” when the installer suggests to create a freebsd-boot partition.