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From: George Hartzell <hartzell@alerce.com>
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Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 10:22:01 -0800
To: Doug Hardie <bc979@lafn.org>
Subject: Re: mac mini
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Cc: openbsd-misc <misc@openbsd.org>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org,
 Friedrich Locke <friedrich.locke@gmail.com>
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Doug Hardie writes:
 > 
 > On 20 November 2013, at 10:09, Friedrich Locke <friedrich.locke@gmail.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > Does anyone here run Open/FreeBSD on mac mini ?
 > > 
 > > Does the OS fully supports macmini hadrwared ?
 > 
 > I have a couple production servers using Minis running FreeBSD 9.1
 > and 9.2.  Check the archives as I posted the procedures I used to
 > install.  Some current Minis require a bit of horsing around to get
 > networking to work.  I have never used a windowing system on them.
 > I only use a dumb terminal for initial setup and then SSH in after
 > that. 

I've been running FreeBSD on a 2008 Intel 8-core Mac Pro (the tower)
for years, just bumped it up to the current 10-BETA3 (now that Andriy
solved the ZFS/mmap bug I was fighting and I can trust my flac tagging
pipeline again).

Works great.  I'm running the gnome desktop using the nvidia binary
distribution to drive a 30" Dell monitor.

Root on Zfs, two disk mirror.  Swapping directly onto partitions, no
mirror or ZFS involved.

I'm still depending on the BIOS emulation to boot and it only gets
triggered if you use MBR formatted disks, not GPT.  That confused the
daylights out of me for a bit.  I'm not sure if the EFI (?) boot stuff
works or not.

One time out of 4 it hangs early in the kernel starting up.  Never
cared enough to get help tracking it down.

g.