Trying to run FreeBSD directly on hardware. Some people say that free operating systems work better on older computers… well, nope.

On my old MacBook Air, it crashes when you try to do any significant disk I/O (like, you know, installation, or just unpacking an archive to a RAM disk) or when starting X. On 10.2-STABLE, it’s general protection fault while in kernel mode or page fault while in kernel mode, on 11-CURRENT it’s vm_page_alloc: page 0x... has unexpected queue N.

On a more recent iMac, it works great. bge(4) Ethernet, nVidia graphics, a USB sound card, USB 3.0 hard drives. 4K videos on YouTube play smoothly. Changing display brightness doesn’t work, but darkening the screen with xbrightness or xrandr is okay on a desktop.

But I wanted to use it on the laptop :-(