Vista won't support EFI Booting... bye bye Duel Booting Intelmacs

[BFG]

What, you mean Vista won't actually ship with all the 'features and inovations' that microsoft promised?? you astound me! Pain in the fecking arse for those of us hoping to make use of the duel booting possibilities... then again if we're talking gaming i think thats probably a very very good think for the mac market. i was sure the mac gaming market would die a horrible rapid death if gamers could just boot windows up.

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.

Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.

It will not be available in the release version of Windows Vista later this year – Microsoft says people will have to wait for an unspecified 'subsequent release of Windows client'. Ritz could not say whether that would be a service pack update to Vista or the next-generation of Windows.

Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch. Because the Apple Intel Mac platform is entirely new, it does not have any legacy support concerns. It was hoped that 2006 would be the year PC makers would make the switch. Microsoft's lack of Windows support is a huge blow to Intel's hopes, and removes most of the incentive for PC makers to implement it in the short term.

That's terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway.

It said its decision to 'reprioritise' EFI development to the server version of Windows was based on a lack of available desktop PCs with EFI support on the market.

"A combination of factors changed our plans. The big one, in my opinion was platform availability. With this huge move to 64-bit based platforms and for us to support it, we needed to see a large heterogeneous sample of 64 bit implementations out there for us to feel comfortable in supporting it." said Ritz.

[Toxic::Joka]

So now apple user want to use Windows? Is armageddon upon us? 

[BFG]

well we live in a windows dominated world... a lot of people have to use windows at work, or produce or develop work that has to live happily in a windows world...

.. and i won't mention the plethora of cheep good games for pc...

[BTs_Mysterio]

Virtualization is what 90% of people want anyways...


...and stop typing "duel" it's "dual", damn it!

[(SiX)Sheixhundt]

Ok, now im confused..

When these machine first came out, i was under the impression that Dual-boot was one of the features that made these machines special. i didn't really care if it would have killed mac gaming, as long as I could have played a wider variety of games.

So when they didnt come stock with those features--which sort of upset me--- (like had been hyped) one  of our macgenius smartasses got off patronizing the fucking SHIT out of me for my system ignorance, stating that that was never even considered and where did i get my information. (which has been his mode of communication recently for some unknown reason) I'm Stil not sure where i got the idea they would be dual boot capable at seom point..just thought it would.
 
So..um...what gives...

Ok yes, I see that that capability will be blocked..but it sounds as though it were actually seriously considered. So am i still missing something, (was this was a serious industry consideration?) Did i mis-anticipate a seemingly brilliant feature  or fall for rumor-hype? Or was this another case of that 'oh-so-much-smarter-than-thou' bullshit i have come to know and love from the young ones?
When in reality the industry was anticipating dual boot capabilities the entire time (until now)

splain lucy.
ty

[Ethion]

Sheix, from what i gathered. Apple wouldn't really stop them from trying to put windows on Mac. And there were talk about a dual-boot feature. But I have no clue how it's supposed to be implemented.

As it seems like Mysterio knows everything, he can tell us.

[BFG]

Shiex the Intel macs use EFI rather than BIOS. Windows Vista was supposed (according to microsoft) to support EFI. Now it seems it won't... or not yet they do say that it might appear in a service pack in the future... sometime.

Apple has done nothing specific to block people from running windows, neither have they done anything to 'aid' it. So if windows Vista supports EFI eventually then yeah it will be possible to dual boot the intel macs that are on the market at the moment, until then unless anyone manages to build a BIOS EFI emulator then its a no go.


(duel / duel same difference, different displaxic spelling )

[BTs_Mysterio]

EFI is supposed to be the next-gen BIOS, it wouldn't really make much sense for Apple to use BIOS. I'm sure they also though that using EFI may limit who boots Mac OS X.

Ethion, I don't know everything however, if Apple had used BIOS like they did in the developers tool kit, booting windows would be as easy as booting OSX by having a minor hack that allow you to select the Windows start up disk. Hell, the Dev Tool Kit systems were booting Windows without issue.

MS had EFI support for their Vista OS, but have dropped it (Like they dropped the whole point of the new OS, new WinFS).

Now, EFI chips often have a legacy loader included by Intel, however Apple has chosen to have that technology removed. There were no costs associated with keeping it, so we can all see that someone at the top of Apple [probably Steve] has made a fool of Phil's claims that they wouldn't try to prevent Windows boot.

Windows booting is still a possibility, if people find a way to enable [install] the Intel "Bridge" software to the chip (or is it considered firmware?). But, people over at the contest trying to get Windows to boot on x86 Macs are trying to find ways to either install CSM [the bridge firmware on the chip] or install XP, copy it to the intel mac, and modify the boot loaders in order to make it run on EFI chips.

There is still progress being made on booting so it isn't lost yet.

Windows through virtualization will be great. Incase everyone forgot in the frenzy to boot the Windows on Mac, there is actually a virtualization layer on the Core Duo processor. This layer is beginning to be tapped by those putting VMWare onto the mac (http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/vmware/). Not only here, but theoretically there's the ability to expand these environments and hack APIs. There is no limit to what can be done inside OS X if those who are skilled stop with the dual-boot stuff (I personally don't want to switch boot every other hour) and focus on making these virtualized environments work fast.

[(SiX)Sheixhundt]

Thanks a lot guys...very thorough.
Omg..and no sarcasm...

I knew I kept you three around for a reason.

cheers

[cottonmouth]

Indeed it does look like the guys at 'the contest' are making some good progress.

http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=60
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32436196@N00/110977744/in/photostream/

[BTs_Mysterio]

Excellent.

[BTs_Mysterio]

Contest Won?

http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=64

(Replied [instead of edited] so the thread would bump)

[BFG]

holy shit this looks like the real thing, can't be certain but my god im freaking inpressed!!

[cottonmouth]

OMG!!!  This Narf guy must have done some serious work.

Lets say this does work, anyone know the reality of playing PC games on an intel mac with XP running? Is all the hardware compatible?  Wish I knew more about this stuff, but it is a huge step in the right direction.

[Ethion]

OMG!!!  This Narf guy must have done some serious work.

Lets say this does work, anyone know the reality of playing PC games on an intel mac with XP running? Is all the hardware compatible?  Wish I knew more about this stuff, but it is a huge step in the right direction.

I don't think so directly.. but pfft what do I know? Let's see what Mysterio has to say.

[BFG]

lol Ethion.

Ok. Possibility of running games on mac?

Im not to sure. the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is with the graphics cards... the current intel macs have pretty much stock everything (to my knowledge) regarding motherboards etc, but the one thing that im not so sure about is graphics cards... as you all know we have a history of having to have special 'mac edition' cards.

That said i've seen no concern and if windows XP is running then sorting out any issues with Graphics cards shouldn't be to much of a hassle!

at a guess Narf must have written his own Unix boot loader... and well god knows how he got VGA working etc its pretty damn impressive if it all works out.

[BTs_Mysterio]

For the graphics card, they will likely need to simply modify the X1600 driver to recognize the "mac" version. It won't be much of an issue, unless Apple messed with direct X compatibility, then they will need to do a bit more. Still won't be a big issue.

[BTs_Mysterio]

Yet another bump worthy update:

http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/legacyboot/
Discussed on their site: http://www.osxbook.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17

Competition heats up as these people also perfect their booter.

And, if you have an intel Mac:

http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=67

Testers are being recruited by site owner.

[BFG]

its official! Windows XP Boots on a Macbook Pro!!

[BFG]

Although the work of Narf sounds great.. im really rather holding out for the guys developing BAMBIOS:

IBM researchers Singh, Smith & Reed are developing in their free time legacy BIOS support for Intel Macs. "BAMBIOS" is using Boch's BIOS emulation code and has also adapted its graphical BIOSes for the current ATi and Intel graphics chipsets used on the Intel Macs today. The BIOS itself loads as a small EFI-capable OS that then chainloads to a second stage boot manager to then boot non-EFI OSes

pssst - yes you could therefore run any BIOS system (windows XP, Vista, or Linux if it so tempted you )