@5uie1 There is no Bluetooth support implemented for this laptop. I also retested it again to see what modules load and it still loads the incorrect one (ng_ubt). If I block it from loading and boot and try to load (ng_ubt_intel) directly, it still loads ng_ubt (and ng_hci, ng_bluetooth):
Nothing new is revealed when doing dmesg and I don’t see a ubt0 device (or any other) listed in /var/log/messages. I’m on stable/13-n252953-af3ccd7b6d4.
Hello everyone !
Has anyone tried to install FreeBSD on the AMD framework laptop 13 ?
The Installation media stuck at boot (see picture) and I was wondering what I can do as workaround in order to get FreeBSD installed on the machine.
Hey @RemiG I did some poking around & got it to work (at least boot) on mine. I am having a graphics issue with drivers I think (X won’t connect) but it did go through the base install
I’m looking forward to putting FreeBSD on my 16 when I get it. I have a 1 TB nvme drive and a 1 TB expansion module.
I haven’t decided yet on whether I’ll install FreeBSD on the internal drive or the expansion module, with Fedora being on the other. Or partition the nvme for both and use the expansion to share data between them using zfs.
It depends on how well FreeBSD runs out of the box. I plan on documenting any issues and helping resolve them if I can, but if there are more than I care for on a new $2500 machine, I might spend more time in Fedora while those get worked out in FreeBSD. I already know the WiFi might be problematic, but that’s easy enough to work around with a USB adapter, or the new Wifibox setup. But most of the rest looks like it might work. We’ll see about the amdgpu video drivers as well on this new hardware.
Yeah, a 2230 is probably ideal. When I ordered the expansion card my thought process was actually to put Tails or Qubes on it and have a removable security oriented OS, like a live USB but faster. But for the cost, I’m not ready to drop money on a 2230 yet, so I’ll use the expansion card for more regular dual booting at first.
Has any run into installing FreeBSD 14 or 15 on AMD version of framework? When I run the installer its hangs after the install selection is pick and during loading the kernel
It’s been a while since I’ve made an update on FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop. I updated the whole page with new status and information. The good news is that FreeBSD works pretty much “perfectly” on this machine. FreeBSD does have a limited 802.11 b/g stack which limits wifi performance, but the iwlwifi driver has significantly improved and so it doesn’t crash the system much anymore. Although resuming from sleep may still cause crashes or the network interface won’t work anymore (you can try restarting the netif/routing services). If not, a reboot should fix it. FreeBSD also still has a limited XHCI/Thunderbolt driver which means that all of the Type C ports will be limited in some way, this can affect I/O performance. Besides these things, everything else is working and can now be a solid daily driver for most things.
The bad news was that all these years I had a faulty mainboard which caused me many years of issues with the USB ports (and possibly other parts of the system). I ordered a new mainboard from the Framework Marketplace, relatively easily replaced my old board, and I was back up and running with all of my ports working again. All of the USB devices lit back up with life, and all was good. I thought it was that FreeBSD just didn’t support that piece of hardware, but it was actually a hardware issue. I’m currently in contact with Framework debugging the older board, although since it’s out of warranty, I may just donate the mainboard “in the name of framework science”. I believe the mission is still moving in the right direction and a successful one at that.
You can visit the blog for more info. I’ll paste here for easier access since this thread has gotten relatively long :).
I run FreeBSD 15 on my AMD framework 13 laptop, though admittedly I didn’t go through the installer so I don’t know if that would freeze. I installed FreeBSD by manually creating a zpool and the relevant ZFS dataset(s), temporarily mounting it at /mnt then:
# cat base.txz | tar --unlink -xpf - -C /mnt
# cat kernel.txz | tar --unlink -xpf - -C /mnt
then manually wrote /etc/rc.conf, /etc/sysctl.conf, /boot/loader.conf, /etc/fstab, /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf (all of these under /mnt).
Do you by any chance use (or have tested) apps such as Zoom, Dropbox and Discord?
I see you’ve posted screenshots of i3 on the blog, do you by any chance know if Wayland works well on FreeBSD. I know Hikari is FreeBSD first for example.
I’ve become fairly used to BTRFS now. Is ZFS preferred over BTRFS in FreeBSD?
I don’t use any of those apps. I normally self host and I deleted my Discord account many years ago.
Yup Wayland works well on FreeBSD but I’ve only used it with sway. You can see some of my older screenshots on FreeBSD which includes some sway screenshots: Index of /freebsd/images
I’m a huge OpenZFS fan and have been using it since around 2012-2013, so I’m not the most unbiased person in this regard. I also use to be one of the OpenZFS maintainers on Gentoo Linux back when I used Linux, and the creator of the bliss-initramfs application which allowed people to boot their Linux rootfs from OpenZFS back in that 2012 period years before many other distros had proper support). I’ve left Linux a while ago for FreeBSD. Since FreeBSD isn’t Linux, we don’t have btrfs. However OpenZFS has about 20 years of development at this point and is rock solid so I would only recommend critical data to be stored on OpenZFS. I’m sure btrfs has gotten better over the years but yeah… In addition, OpenZFS is merged directly into the FreeBSD kernel and there is close collaboration between some FreeBSD developers and OpenZFS developers IIRC.
I would need to give the Bluetooth stack in FreeBSD another try and see what happens. I’ll let you know whenever I get a chance for that.
