FreeBSD - MacBook and Broadcom BCM4321

As part of reviving my MacBook 4,1 (or early 2008 / A1181) on which I decided to install FreeBSD, I encountered some difficulties with the wifi adapter. bwn_pci0@pci0:2:0:0: class=0x028000 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x14e4 device=0x4328 subvendor=0x106b subdevice=0x0088 vendor = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries' device = 'BCM4321 802.11a/b/g/n' class = network Here are the steps I had to go through to get it working. First a custom kernel has to be build with the BWN_GPL_PHY option that allows to build some GPL-licensed portions of the driver code base.

FreeBSD - MacBook Wayland only setup

I decided to revive my old Macbook 4,1 (or early 2008 / A1181) and FreeBSD seemed like a good fit. In addition I wanted to see if I could achieve a Wayland-only setup I could use easily, knowing that my activities are mostly web browsing and shell. The first thing was to get a booting install media, I had to use a 12.2 USB image as I couldn’t go past the loading kernel step on 13.

DragonFlyBSD - french keyboard in initrd

I did install DragonFlyBSD on my laptop using a Hammer2 filesystem on top of a dm-crypt device, following the instruction of the official documentation. The only problem is that I use an azerty keyboard and the uncrypting dialog when booting offers a qwerty layout. That can be a little annoying for people having special characters in their passwords. This is how I managed to have an azerty layout to type my decrypting password at boot time.