# Mac Pro with FreeBSD, Windows and OS X.



## roddierod (Nov 28, 2012)

Does anyone have any experience using a Xeon based Mac Pro with these three OSes.  I would configure the machine with 3 separate drives for each OS. Would that require a boot loader, is that possible, can it even be done?   I might even add a 4th drive for a Linux distro.

I've got some development opportunities coming up that will require cross platform abilities and I'm just trying to purchase one new machine.


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## chatwizrd (Nov 28, 2012)

Why wouldnt you just use virtualbox and save yourself the headache.


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## roddierod (Nov 28, 2012)

I'm using VirtualBox for Windows and Linux currently, but the performance is not acceptable to me.

I've been unable to get any for of OS X to work in VirtualBox.


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## Beeblebrox (Nov 28, 2012)

The best solution is sysutils/grub in my opinion. With that you can boot up to 256 (I think) different partitions and even iso's directly. The setup is a little complicated however, and grub does not work very well with root on zfs (last I checked which has been a while). grub does work readily with btrfs however.
A full hdd partition tutorial here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31713


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## roddierod (Nov 28, 2012)

I don't care for grub, I'm using OSL2000 but I don't think it is compatible with MACs.

But I think I found the answer to my multi-boot question here if anyone else is interested.

I assume that FreeBSD 9 plays nicely with EFI bios.


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## heja2009 (Nov 28, 2012)

I don't know about Mac Pro's or multiple disks, but 2 years ago I set up my MacBook Pro to triple boot via "rEFIt", an EFI based boot loader that supports all the Mac specialties including some very nice graphical boot images. Since on a Mac, you want to boot with some style of course ;-)

My experience with rEFIt was pretty good, and that was with a mixed GPT/pseudo-MBR partitioning then still required by Windows...
http://refit.sourceforge.net


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## kpa (Nov 28, 2012)

Download a trial of Parallels desktop 8 for Mac and see if it performs better than VirtualBox for you. I've been very pleased with the performance myself, I can play some of the older direct3d games on a windows xp and window8 guests without any major issues. Well worth the money imo.


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## Martillo1 (Nov 29, 2012)

As for VirtualBox performance, I can advise you about setting no more than two emulated processors in the VM. Some guest OS scalate processors badly. For example FreeBSD and OpenBSD works better with two than with eight virtual processors, however NetBSD scalates nicely. At least in my case, with FreeBSD as host OS.


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## unixlearn (Dec 12, 2012)

*similar situation*

this may help as i have a similar situation. windows 7 on drive A. drive B = 1/2 Freebsd partition + 1/2 NTFS partition free workspace. I can choose two different ways.
1) I use my bios to select the drive order it boots from. ex. CD/Drive1/Drive2/ can be changed to Drive2/CD/Drive1 boot order. So i can boot to drive 2 first, thus booting to freebsd. If i leave the order as default it will boot to windows drive.
2) If i leave it on booting on drive 2 i can also use the native bsd boot manager to select which drive i would like to boot to. it recognizes my other Drives and gives me the selection of F1 F2 F5. it also recognizes my window NTFS partition with that is not bootable.

hope that helps or gives you some ideas. it can be done though.


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## throAU (Dec 13, 2012)

2c.

I'd just use Virtualbox or VMware Fusion.  I use Fusion myself for similar reasons.

It will be FAR less faffing about and you get the benefit of snapshots for your development environments - including OS X if you install OS X into a VM was well - in addition to being able to run multiple environments at the same time for client/server network development and testing.


edit:
Just saw your post with regards to Virtualbox.  OS X can be run in Fusion just fine and performance is fine so long as you allocate enough RAM.  Buy big on RAM (it's cheap) and you're set.


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## roddierod (Dec 13, 2012)

VMWare Fusion is the paid version of VMWare, am I correct?

So you are running OS X as the host OS or Windows?


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## throAU (Dec 14, 2012)

I'm using OS X as the host, and run Windows or FreeBSD or Linux as VMs if required.

And yes, Fusion is payware, but it's not very expensive.

You can run OS X in a VM under Fusion in OS X to use as a test playpen without tainting your host version of OS X.


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