Dual boot Linux and FreeBSD
by bulliver from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6QYRM)
Hey all,
I've managed to find a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad L470 for peanuts, so I went ahead and ordered it. It's not in my hands yet, but I'm already looking into installing Gentoo and FreeBSD on it in a dual-boot scenario. To that end I have done a lot of reading and research over the last few days, and I'm looking for some advice and perhaps clarification because I have not yet had any experience with hardware that uses UEFI, and the efi boot partition.
The laptop has 16GM RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive.
The Gentoo install seems straight forward enough, and I will be following the official install docs to prepare the disk for GPT/UEFI. So I will create three partitions, the VFAT /efi partition, a swap partition, and an ext4 partition for /. I will leave unpartitioned space on the disk for the FreeBSD install.
Now, where I am having some doubts is with the FreeBSD install, as their official docs only show an example of installing on the entirety of a dedicated disk. It seems there are many, many different ways to set up the dual boot, and many choices available to boot the systems, but in my research I have identified two different strategies that seem to be the 'best', or at least the easiest. I intend to use Grub 2, as I have familiarity with it, so in terms of installing and booting FreeBSD I can either:
1. Make three partitions: /bsd-boot, swap, and /, and then use Grub to chainload FreeBSD
or:
2. Just make 2 partitions, /, and swap, and copy the FreeBSD efi blob to the existing /efi partition created under Gentoo, and configure Grub to boot it that way.
First of all, some confirmation that I am understanding this correctly would be nice, haha, and second, which of these two strategies is easier and/or better?
In terms of strategy 2, how, during the FreeBSD install, do I tell the installer to copy the needed files to the /efi partition? Do I need to drop to a shell and mount it manually? Will it be auto-discovered? I'm not sure of the specifics here, and the FreeBSD docs don't seem to speak to the issue that I have found.
If it matters, I will be using UFS for the FreeBSD / filesystem. ZFS appears to add a lot of complexity to the install that I am not sure I will see a ROI for.
Any advice and clarification would be most appreciated.
Thanks!
I've managed to find a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad L470 for peanuts, so I went ahead and ordered it. It's not in my hands yet, but I'm already looking into installing Gentoo and FreeBSD on it in a dual-boot scenario. To that end I have done a lot of reading and research over the last few days, and I'm looking for some advice and perhaps clarification because I have not yet had any experience with hardware that uses UEFI, and the efi boot partition.
The laptop has 16GM RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive.
The Gentoo install seems straight forward enough, and I will be following the official install docs to prepare the disk for GPT/UEFI. So I will create three partitions, the VFAT /efi partition, a swap partition, and an ext4 partition for /. I will leave unpartitioned space on the disk for the FreeBSD install.
Now, where I am having some doubts is with the FreeBSD install, as their official docs only show an example of installing on the entirety of a dedicated disk. It seems there are many, many different ways to set up the dual boot, and many choices available to boot the systems, but in my research I have identified two different strategies that seem to be the 'best', or at least the easiest. I intend to use Grub 2, as I have familiarity with it, so in terms of installing and booting FreeBSD I can either:
1. Make three partitions: /bsd-boot, swap, and /, and then use Grub to chainload FreeBSD
or:
2. Just make 2 partitions, /, and swap, and copy the FreeBSD efi blob to the existing /efi partition created under Gentoo, and configure Grub to boot it that way.
First of all, some confirmation that I am understanding this correctly would be nice, haha, and second, which of these two strategies is easier and/or better?
In terms of strategy 2, how, during the FreeBSD install, do I tell the installer to copy the needed files to the /efi partition? Do I need to drop to a shell and mount it manually? Will it be auto-discovered? I'm not sure of the specifics here, and the FreeBSD docs don't seem to speak to the issue that I have found.
If it matters, I will be using UFS for the FreeBSD / filesystem. ZFS appears to add a lot of complexity to the install that I am not sure I will see a ROI for.
Any advice and clarification would be most appreciated.
Thanks!