Ray - PC-BSD / FrameBuffer

Hello Allan, Kris,

I recently made the switch from Debian to FreeBSD, with recently meaning the last 2 years, but it takes a while to build up confidence in a new system. I Love the show and am listening to all the new ones when they come out and spend the rest of the week, mostly in my commute and in the gym, catching up with the older episodes.

At work I am converting our Debian PBX systems over to freeswitch, therefore I try to dogfood and use FreeBSD on our desktops as well. We use PCBsd, mainly because out of convenience. It is out of the box more desktop orientated.

Now, my question is this, I have a T430 which works perfectly fine for me, but company policy dictates Toshiba for new purchases. A team-member of mine (Rodrigo, in copy to this email) suffers now through with FreeBSD (PCBsd) on this machine because it is broadwell based and the main problem is grafic based. He uses the VESA driver and it is very, very, very slow. You can work with it but just barely. On one of your shows you mentioned your setups and Kris is working with the Frambuffer driver on a Retina Display and he said it works fine, could you give us some hints on how to configure PCBsd on this broadwell based machine so it work with the Framebuffer driver (I guess it would mean boot with (U)EFI or something along those lines)? Or is Broadwell just not supported right now no matter what?

Another annoying thing on this machine is upgrades, we run PCBSD 11, the monthly branches. For reference, I installed with November install image (installed with freebsd bootloader) and the first January upgrade installed the grub-bootloader and I use grub since then. My upgrades are working fine.
But my mate installed with a later image and it installed the freebsd bootloader and it did not get changed on upgrades, which is fine, but nearly every upgrade is borked. After the upgrade, on reboot, the new kernel is booted, but all 3rd party packages are deleted and the system is nearly unuseable. If you choose other bootenvironments in the boot-loader, booting then starts spitting out errors along the lines that the compiled kernel is not compatible with modules, userland is not working etc. Switching to any boot environment from the boot loader does the same thing, there is no stable boot, which leads me to believe there is something wrong in the bootloader in this case.

To solve it, I had to boot with the newest environment, which booted, but did not have anything installed, I manually installed pkg, then beadm, and from beadm, activated an older boot environment, rebooted, and now it came up fine. Not sure what to do, manually install the freebsd bootloader again? Install grub? ZFS is installed as per default from the installer.  I like the freebsd boot loader and prefer to not have to use grub. (incidently, how can I reinstall the freebsd bootloader on my T430, which got "upgraded" to grub with the aforementioned january image?).

Please find attached a couple of infos regarding the system.

Thank you for reading my mail,
Best regards
Ray