I became interested in BSD's this week. The thought of installing one on my hardware had been crawling around my head ever since someone told me their "plan for the weekend is to install an original Unix while my girlfriend is away".

So I dived in and tried what I believe to be the 3 most popular and root distributions: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. I cared about 3 things: support for EFI booting, GPT, and WiFi.

First I had to dig through lots of (what I consider to be) legacy information about slices, wedges and (BSD) disklabels.

FreeBSD has an EFI boot loader, supports GPT but the iwm module panic the kernel about 80% of the time.

NetBSD supports GPT, doesn't have an EFI bootloader and WiFi works 90% of the time. Only sometimes does it decide to show me the middle finger.

OpenBSD doesn't support GPT, nor EFI, and I can't test the WiFi because the firmware needs to be downloaded after the install. Talk of planning right there... Someone is working on EFI and GPT upstream which works in a virtual machine, but I'm having problems installing it onto a real hard drive.

Update: So FreeBSD is still unusable due to the WiFi-related panics. NetBSD seems to have decided that after initially working quite correctly with respect to the WiFi, the wpa-supplicant is incorrect for it. So now on boot it stalls at the WiFi configuration until I cancel. Since I don't have time to figure these things out right now, I'll leave it for a better time.

OpenBSD appears to work quite well if you ignore the not-obvious mechanics of mixing experimental GPT support with classic BSD disklabels. I made 1 OpenBSD partition and within that 4 labels: /, swap, /usr, /var. But when using disklabel it also showed me some of the other partitions that I had on that hard drive. Some, because I have 16 GPT partitions + the 4 OpenBSD ones and only 16 total are supported by disklabel.

When it comes to booting I can boot FreeBSD using only their bootloader, fully in EFI mode. NetBSD can be booted as a kernel from EFI grub. The only one that can't be booted in EFI mode is OpenBSD. Although that is being worked on.

On the bright side, all of the things I was testing are part of *BSD-CURRENT. This goes especially for the iwm module used by my Intel 7260 chip. It was first introduced to OpenBSD, then NetBSD copied it and finally it made it's way into FreeBSD. So hopefully once the rough edges are ironed out things will be up to this years par some time next year (or in November in the case of OpenBSD). I'll definitely keep tracking the progress, but for now I'll experiment with FreeBSD in a VM.