BSD on New Hardware
reddit / BSD

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punchspear · 2017-12-26 23:15

For the foreseeable future, I may end up buying myself a laptop with
an AMD Ryzen CPU. As far as I've read, Dragonfly BSD is the only BSD
OS with support for AMD Ryzen.

If I want to install BSD on such a computer, and put Windows inside
that BSD OS, should I go with Dragonfly BSD? Or could I somehow
install any one of the other three BSD OSes? Would I need to write
some code while compiling the kernel, in order for the OS to be
compatible with the CPU and other hardware?

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piglit3 · 2017-12-26 23:19

I think all the BSDs support Ryzen CPUs -- x86 CPUs are very backwards
compatible, it's usually graphics or wireless cards that are
problematic.

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twizmwazin · 2017-12-27 06:06

As with any new release, I'd expect nearly any OS to work, however
with a lot of gotchas. New features may not be supported, and
optimizations for that specific architecture will not be available. Of
course, in time these issues would be worked out.

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BumpitySnook · 2017-12-27 07:00

Dragonfly is definitely not the only BSD with any Ryzen support.  As
another commenter said, in many ways, it's just another x86 CPU.  Any
BSD will run fine on it unmodified.  That said, FreeBSD has good
support for Ryzen family features.

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punchspear · 2017-12-27 21:52

I didn't know x86 CPUs are backwards compatible.

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3G6A5W338E · 2018-01-06 17:02

You can run MSDOS on your Ryzen.

MSDOS is the OS that came with the original IBM PC.