Adventures with OpenBSD on a 2014 MacBook Pro 15"

[2984839]

With a commit 2 weeks ago, the BCM43602 wifi card is now working properly in OpenBSD -current, so it was time to finally try it on my 2014 MacBook Pro. I've been using a T14 AMD as my main laptop but the display quality is far behind the Retina MBP. I have long wanted to make this my main laptop, but it lacked a usable operating system until now.

The install was a normal gpt/EFI/softraid crypto install which I won't cover here. The only gotcha is that apparently there is a bug in the newer Intel firmware blob that causes the laptop to hang with a blank screen when trying to to start inteldrm. I had to boot to the ramdisk, mount the real disk, download the intel-firmware-20191115v0.tgz set from ye olde OpenBSD 6.6, and extract it manually to /etc/firmware to fix this. I'm not sure what the long term consequences are of using this old firmware with -current, which expects me to have a much newer firmware version, but for now, it's working and it's the only way to get it to work.

dmesg attached for the curious

Screenshot:

 

[thrakkar]

This is great, thanks for sharing! I've been wanting to get BSD running on my 2014 Macbook Pro but the wireless driver has been (until now) the stumbling block.

 

[2984839]

This is great, thanks for sharing! I've been wanting to get BSD running on my 2014 Macbook Pro but the wireless driver has been (until now) the stumbling block.

The bwfm driver only works with Broadcom “full mac” cards, and I believe the BCM43602 is the only one that was offered by Apple and fits in their proprietary connector. Your MBP may have it or it may not, because these were shipped with various wifi cards. Mine did not, so I got one on eBay and swapped it in.

 

[thrakkar]

The bwfm driver only works with Broadcom “full mac” cards, and I believe the BCM43602 is the only one that was offered by Apple and fits in their proprietary connector. Your MBP may have it or it may not, because these were shipped with various wifi cards. Mine did not, so I got one on eBay and swapped it in.

OK, good to know. I had not yet done any reading about the bwfm driver - moot point as I have a plain BCM4360 installed. I've ordered a Realtek based USB wifi adapter to solve the problem instead and will see how it goes in a few days.