In November 2007 I bought a new black Apple MacBook with a 2.2 GHz processor, 250 GB disk and 2 GB RAM (a MacBook3,1-series). Because I'm a FreeBSD nut, I fired up Boot Camp and created a new partition for a FreeBSD install. Unfortunately, it turned out that FreeBSD needed some patching to work properly.

FreeBSD fails to start the second CPU core

One of the problems almost all Linux and BSD systems have been facing when it comes to Apple MacBook support, is starting the second core of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Fortunately, Rui Paulo came up with a patch that disables a certain flag in the ICH chipset, disabling the USB legacy support that makes FreeBSD boot properly.

As of December 12, 2007, this patch has been integrated into the FreeBSD source code. This means that FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 and later will boot on the MacBook out of the box.

FreeBSD doesn't detect the Marvell Yukon II ethernet adapter

When I installed FreeBSD, it turned out the msk(4) driver didn't support my revision of the adapter. The author of the driver committed my patch on November 20, 2007, and added support for Message Signaled Interrupts the day after. This means that you don't need any patches anymore.

ATA controllers only run on UDMA33

The Apple MacBook contains two ATA controllers that aren't listed in the FreeBSD ATA driver yet, which causes them to only run on UDMA33. This patch makes the controller with the disk run on SATA150 and the one with the DVD drive run on UDMA100. I haven't had any problems with this patch yet, but I'm not sure whether it's correct.

The snd_hda(4) driver attaches, but output is silent

Another thing that didn't work properly on my Apple Macbook, was that the audio output turned out to be muted. It only worked when hint.pcm.%d.config was set to gpio0 in the hints file. There was also this other problem that the speakers didn't mute when a head phone was plugged in. As of November 21, 2007 the snd_hda(4) driver has been patched to work properly.

Broadcom BCM4328 is not supported

I had some problems getting the BCM4328 Wifi working, but it should work now. I just used the same trick Coleman Kane used to get his Broadcom working on his HP Compaq 6715b.

Problems...

There are still some small problems that I have experienced so far:

Suspending the system is not supported in FreeBSD's amd64 port.
The synaptics touchpad driver is probably only available on Linux?
There is no support for the Fn key, which means there are no home, end, page-up and page-down buttons.

Last modified: Mon Mar 21 15:43:36 2011 +0100