mac mini

[Mark Felder]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013, at 12:22, George Hartzell wrote:
> Doug Hardie writes:
>  > 
>  > On 20 November 2013, at 10:09, Friedrich Locke <friedrich.locke at 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.
> 

I know someone with the same model of Mac Pro but he's been in the
process of moving. I'll see if I can convince him to install FreeBSD on
a drive and reproduce that hang.

When was the last time you ran OSX on it? There might be a
BIOS/firmware/EFI update waiting.