The minimal configuration to install FreeBSD varies with the FreeBSD version and the
hardware architecture.
Information about the minimal configuration is available in the Installation Notes on
the Release
Information page of the FreeBSD web site. A summary of this information is given in
the following sections. Depending on the method you choose to install FreeBSD, you may
also need a floppy drive, a supported CDROM drive, and in some case a network adapter.
This will be covered by the Section
2.3.7.
Both FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/pc98 require a 486 or better processor and at least
24 MB of RAM. You will need at least 150 MB of free hard drive space for the
most minimal installation.
Note: In case of old configurations, most of time, getting more RAM and more
hard drive space is more important than getting a faster processor.
To install FreeBSD/alpha, you will need a supported platform (see Section 2.2.2) and a
dedicated disk for FreeBSD. It is not possible to share a disk with another operating
system at this time. This disk will need to be attached to a SCSI controller which is
supported by the SRM firmware or an IDE disk assuming the SRM in your machine supports
booting from IDE disks.
You will need the SRM console firmware for your platform. In some cases, it is
possible to switch between AlphaBIOS (or ARC) firmware and SRM. In others it will be
necessary to download new firmware from the vendor's Web site.
Note: Support for the Alpha was removed beginning with FreeBSD 7.0. The
FreeBSD 6.X series of releases is the last
containing support for this architecture.
There are two classes of processors capable of running FreeBSD/amd64. The first are
AMD64 processors, including the AMD Athlon™64,
AMD Athlon64-FX, AMD Opteron™ or better processors.
The second class of processors that can use FreeBSD/amd64 includes those using the
Intel® EM64T architecture. Examples of these
processors include the Intel Core™ 2 Duo, Quad, and Extreme processor families and
the Intel Xeon™
3000, 5000, and 7000 sequences of processors.
If you have a machine based on an nVidia nForce3 Pro-150, you must use the BIOS setup to disable the IO
APIC. If you do not have an option to do this, you will likely have to disable ACPI
instead. There are bugs in the Pro-150 chipset that we have not found a workaround for
yet.
To install FreeBSD/sparc64, you will need a supported platform (see Section 2.2.2).
You will need a dedicated disk for FreeBSD/sparc64. It is not possible to share a disk
with another operating system at this time.
A list of supported hardware is provided with each FreeBSD release in the FreeBSD
Hardware Notes. This document can usually be found in a file named HARDWARE.TXT, in the top-level directory of a CDROM or FTP
distribution or in sysinstall's documentation menu. It lists,
for a given architecture, what hardware devices are known to be supported by each release
of FreeBSD. Copies of the supported hardware list for various releases and architectures
can also be found on the Release Information page of the FreeBSD Web site.
