FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop

[Mario_Limonciello]

No idea. Just wanted to give you the hint those are the big ones needed.

[fearedbliss]

I posted my recent laptop upgrades on my blog and also documented me encountering the infamous Intel 400 Mhz Slowness bug. I also left a comment here.

12th Gen/Win 11 suddenly super slow

I also experienced this bug just now on FreeBSD 14.1-STABLE stable/14-n268491-09d61b28a00a GENERIC amd64 on 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1185G7 @ 3.00GHz (2995.20-MHz K8-class CPU) after I upgraded several parts, including my 55 Wh battery to 61 Wh battery. I was already on BIOS 3.20 when this happened. Doing your suggestion fixed my issue. Thank you! We can see the before and after speeds: sysctl -a | grep dev.cpu.[0-9] | grep freq: | sort -n Before -------- dev.cpu.0.freq: 398 dev.cpu.1.fr…

[RemiG]

Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD’s strategic move toward broader adoption...

Some really good news from the FreeBSD Foundation !

[fearedbliss]

Niiiiiceeee! Let’s goo! I’m very excited about this news. Thanks for sharing.

[Michael_Jensen]

…oh the day when I’ll be rich enough, or know enough, to help them out…

[fearedbliss]

Hello all,

I’ve upgraded from the 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1185G7 to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. Many core components on this Mainboard are not supported by FreeBSD, so I’ve decided to switch the OS on this particular machine. This concludes my updates for my FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop page.

[junaruga]

The following Framework’s repository about “FreeBSD on Framework” was mentioned at this Reddit thread. I am not sure what the “roles” and the YAML files man in the repository. I updated the first comment on this thread.

GitHub - FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework: Guide on installing and using FreeBSD on Framework...

[a116]

“Roles” are a concept in ansible (software). You can “apply” them to your machine to avoid manual configuration.

[junaruga]

@a116

“Roles” are a concept in ansible (software). You can “apply” them to your machine to avoid manual configuration.

Thank you! I learned from you. It’s interesting to see that Framework is creating software-based installation scripts for FreeBSD.

[fearedbliss]

Thanks for the update @junaruga. I’m very happy to see all of this development for FreeBSD + Framework Laptop, and also to see this:

Framework 13 AMD 7040 Series Working with DRM 6.2 (FreeBSD 14.2)

I may need to try and get FreeBSD 14.2 running on this laptop and see what happens, I would be happy to switch back to running FreeBSD as my primary OS on this laptop.

[Hectopussy]

I was gonna try dualboot FreeBSD on AMD 13" Framework (7640U) however I’ll I won’t until the WIFI and bluetooth works. Nice to hear that they seam to work on better laptop support and framework in particular.

[Richard_Lee1]

Couldn’t you just get an Intel AX210 (or any of the older ones)? I see them listed in FreeBSD supported card list: WiFi/Iwlwifi/Chipsets - FreeBSD Wiki

[James3]

This is just a suggestion. Take it or leave it.
For running FreeBSD on the FW13 or FW16, one work around would be using a Linux KVM / Hypervisor and then essentially running FreeBSD as a full screen VM.
I have not actually tested FreeBSD like this, but I have Redox OS running full screen on my FW16 using this method, so I assume FreeBSD would work also.
For those interested, Redox OS is an OS written entirely in the rust programming language.
It does not have a lot of hardware support, so not supported on bare metal FW16, but works quite happily when running as a full screen VM. When using a full screen VM, it has the same user experience as if it was on base metal.

[William_Pool]

Curious how are you all are installing FreeBSD?

I’m on a 2012 MBP with OSX, and the FW16 I got this week, I planned to go FreeBSD.

However, when I run dd on the memstick image as sugested (normal standard dd) and or Etcher with the ISO image, it just borks saying no EFI boot.

The laptop SEEs the disks, so I know the USB stick is visible.

I’ve tried multiple IMG and ISO FreeBSD 14.2 & 15.0 files for AMD64 to no avail.

However, I can run Etcher on Linux ISOs all day and install fine. LOL

Baffled as why the FreeBSD image won’t go on USB and install.

[Adrian_Joachim]

@William_Pool

However, when I run dd on the memstick image as sugested (normal standard dd) and or Etcher with the ISO image, it just borks saying no EFI boot.

Quick google search says freebsd may need extra setps to make uefi booting from a stick work UEFI - FreeBSD Wiki

You could also just try ventoy, good chance that’ll work.

[Tom1]

To boot the FreeBSD ISO? Nah, you shouldn’t need to do anything special. The page you linked to is about how to manually create a bootable image from the FreeBSD source code. I just tested on my AMD FW13 with the regular pre-built images and it worked. Steps:

1. I downloaded the latest memstick image of the released version of FreeBSD (14.2):

wget 'https://download.freebsd.org/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/14.2/FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img'

2. I confirmed the sha256 checksum of the downloaded image which should be 90121a72477a3d74cf4d2d3715836b7624f4a8cdaa08b8131faa88e21b15b32b according to https://download.freebsd.org/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/14.2/CHECKSUM.SHA256-FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64 :

sha256sum FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img

3. I wrote that image to a flash drive (replace /dev/sda with whatever device corresponds to your flash drive):

sudo dd if=FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sda status=progress

4. I ran sync to confirm that the data had been flushed to the flash drive.

5. Then I rebooted, went into firmware and disabled secure boot

6. Finally, I rebooted into the firmware, when into the boot menu, and selected my flash drive. FreeBSD then successfully booted from the flash drive.

Ventoy also works (and I just tested that to confirm), but in my experience ventoy only works with the disc-based images, not the memstick images. so you’d use https://download.freebsd.org/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/14.2/FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso with a sha256 of a3c771e2fa958e922a5771047d524d7df3ce501e58bed5c65f0226e4d31ebd30 instead.

[Tom1]

My best guess: do you perhaps have secureboot enabled? I know at least the AMD FW13 boards shipped with secureboot enabled and I remember getting a pretty scary unintuitive error message when I popped my SSD with a non-secureboot setup into that motherboard. I don’t know if FreeBSD ISOs ship with a signed boot loader or not but I’d recommend checking that and perhaps disabling secure boot.

(Fwiw I’m not a secureboot-hater. I’ve got it set up on my nixos install, and it seems FreeBSD has some support for it, but idk if the ISOs ship with a secureboot signed bootloader)

[William_Pool]

Yep SecureBoot was my issue. Thanks!

[William_Pool]

Alrighty, I’m up running KDE Plasma on the FW16 with FreeBSD 14.2. Thanks everyone!

[fearedbliss]

Hey all, I’m back and got FreeBSD working again on the 7040. Thanks to @William_Pool and other people in the FreeBSD community that have been posting things here and there regarding support for this board. I’ll be updating my page as I test more things out, but I have a system up and running to do my day-to-day stuff. I’ve updated my page accordingly, I’ve also moved the old 11th gen reports to a different page (but you can still easily find it on my blog). I did come into this knowing that the MEDIATEK Wifi card isn’t working and no bluetooth, but I’m willing to give those up for now. I also still have my old Intel AX210 and Atheros AR9462 which I may give those another shot and see what happens. For now I’m just using the Ethernet expansion card which seems to be working in a stable way so far and performance is good enough to sync my 50 GB of Syncthing data, only time will tell though ;P.

• FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop (AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics)

• FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop (Intel 11th Gen) (No Longer Updated)