Using a 2013 Mac Pro as a freeBSD Desktop

marc

marc

Introduction​

Previous guides to installing freeBSD on a 2013 Mac Pro (Mac Pro 6,1 a.k.a the Trashcan) did not cover Xorg or sound configuration. In this guide, we will set up a GPU-accelerated desktop with sound using freeBSD 14.2 RELEASE. My 2013 Mac Pro has the dual AMD D700 video cards and the 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2, but it should work for other configurations. For sake of simplicity I will use the entire disk and will not cover dual or triple booting. I will cover the (I) initial setup, (II) getting Xorg to work and (III) getting sound to work.

I. Initial setup​

When booting the installer, press 3 in the boot menu and enter SET hw.pci.enable_pcie_hp="0", then type menu to return to the boot menu. This is necessary to prevent a looping error message from showing up on the command line. We can now boot the installer and follow the usual steps of installation. However, after finishing the installer choose "Yes" for final modifications. We can now enter the following lines in /boot/loader.conf

Code: 
hw.pci.enable_pcie_hp="0"
coretemp_load="YES"
asmc_load="YES"
vmm_load="YES"
pptdevs="2/0/0"

hw.pci.enable_pcie_hp prevents a looping error message at boot. coretemp_load and asmc_load allow us to read CPU and sensor data. The last two entries hide one of the D700 video cards from the system. The 2013 Mac Pro has two D700 cards, card A at pci 2:0:0 and card B at pci 6:0:0. Only card B can output video, and if you don't hide card A, the video drivers will try to use card A because it has the lower PCI bus address. An added benefit of this setup is that card A is now available for GPU-passtrough in Bhyve.

II. Setting up Xorg​

First we will install the graphics drivers. For my current setup, graphics/drm-61-kmod, the package that comes with the graphics/drm-kmod metapackage, crashes the system at boot. Perhaps using ports may yield better results, but as a quick workaround I swiched to the package graphics/drm-515-kmod while leaving the other graphics/drm-kmod packages untouched.

Code: 
# pkg install drm-kmod
# pkg del -f drm-61-kmod
# pkg install drm-515-kmod
# sysrc kld_list+=amdgpu

Now we can install Xorg. The x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu driver for Xorg is not automatically installed with the metapackage so we need to select it manually.

Code: 
# pkg install xorg xf86-video-amdgpu

After a reboot to load the amdgpu module, Xorg will fail when we try using startx. To fix this, we can create a configuration file, copy it to the default X11 configuration location, and rename it "xorg.conf".

Code: 
# Xorg -configure
# cp /root/xorg.conf.new /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf

After this step, Xorg usually starts without problems. If it fails with an error referring to not being able to set framebuffer mode, ensure that in xorg.conf all cards defined in the "Device" sections use the amdgpu driver, like shown below:

Code: 
Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card2"
        Driver      "amdgpu"
        BusID       "PCI:6:0:0"
EndSection

Now we can Xorg with startx, and install a desktop environment according to the freeBSD handbook.

III. Sound​

The Mac Pro uses a Cirrus Logic chip which is automatically detected and no drivers need to be explicitly loaded. However, none of the output sockets work out of the box because the jack-detection logic is inverted. To get sound output, we have to connect our speakers to the headphone jack instead of the line-out jack. Then, we add a device hint to ensure the sound driver uses the inverted logic by adding hint.hdaa.0.config="senseinv" at the bottom of /boot/device.hints. As a final touch, we set the headphone jack as the default sound unit by adding hw.snd.default_unit=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf

Final thoughts​

With this we get a GPU-accelerated desktop with sound. Seeing that we have a CPU with many cores and threads, and an extra GPU ready for use in Bhyve, the 2013 Mac Pro has potential for use with virtual machines.

Sources​

Instructions for the initial setup and the hw.pci.enable_pcie_hp="0" fix. Also covers multi-booting.
https://anschwa.com/blog/2022/01/03/installing-freebsd-on-2013-macpro.html

An explanation why the sound doesn't work out of the box and a Linux solution to the inverted-jack-detection logic:
https://www.tumblr.com/lewisinthela...44672/ubuntu-2004-on-2013-trashcan-mac-pro-61
 
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