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Windows on Intel Macs - Yes or No?
With the announcement of the Intel chip based MacBook, the door is now open for running the Windows OS on Macintosh hardware, right? jaypatrick writes "BetaNews reports that along with the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple's use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than BIOS, current Windows releases will not run on the systems." I guess not. But, wait... Big Z writes "Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview Tuesday that the company won't sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn't done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves." I think someone actually trying it out is the only way this is going to get straightened out.
Apple hasn't done anything to preclude Windows, or any other OS, from being installed on the Intel-based Macs. That is a perfectly accurate statement. Apple Vice President Phil Schiller's two direct quotes on the subject, the most recent which was made on January 10, 2006, can be seen here. Intel has also specifically said that Apple will not be using proprietary chipsets and/or processors, and they'll just represent standard Intel offerings.
;-)
Windows XP would directly boot and install on the Developer Transition Kit platform because it was just a standard Intel motherboard and processor, and also used a standard Intel BIOS.
However, the shipping Intel-based Macs use EFI (Wikipedia article), Intel's "next generation of BIOS". (more info)
Windows XP 32-bit does not currently support EFI for booting. Windows XP 64-bit does, but Intel Core Duo is not a 64-bit chip. Now, there are a bunch of other variables, such as whether or not Apple's current EFI implementation offers BIOS backward-compatibility, and so on, but it's clear that regardless, EFI is the future, and it's only a matter of time before the PC world at large transitions to EFI. Further, Windows Vista does support EFI. See here for Microsoft's presentations on EFI, particularly the first two links.
That said, dual booting is intensely annoying anyway, and the really interesting thing will be able to just run Windows (or some other x86 OS) and Mac OS X side-by-side.
What we will *definitely* see are "Virtual PC"-like programs that let you run Windows alongside OS X (in a Window, or taking over the screen, etc., with a hotkey to flip back and forth, for example).
It's important to note this will NOT be emulation: Windows (or other x86 OS) will run at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware (with certain exceptions). There could even be direct access to video, with support for things like DirectX.
vmware already has a version for Mac OS X in development, and Microsoft has already announced they will be developing a version of Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs that one can only presume will be a virtual machine. Then there are things like QEMU, Xen, etc. The Darwin/Mac OS X version of WINE, DarWINE, has even been working under betas of Mac OS X for Intel. Now that Intel Macs are shipping, it will only be a matter of weeks/months before we have several options for running Windows itself, and/or Windows applications at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware.
And since Intel Core Duo also supports Intel's VT hardware virtualization, the possibilities of future virtual machine technology are even more interesting. But the bottom line is that Apple is again leading the way with the adoption of technologies like EFI and ExpressCard. Naturally, it will take a little while for Windows to catch up.
They can include support for Legacy BIOS in EFI. If apple includes this option (or if there is a way to flash your bios with legacy bios support) then you WILL be able to boot windows on new mac hardware.
However 64 bit windows and Longhorn both do / will support EFI so that is always a option (although the current intel chips in the macs are 32bit I believe).
For this reason, I doubt people are going to find much use using the port since it's a) cheaper to piece their own machine together and leave the specs up to themselves and b) Windows will probably run slower.
It's not like the BIOS is a processor architecture. I highly doubt that any work required to make Windows XP work with EFI will not drastically, or even noticably affect the speed of the machine.
GRUB already works with EFI, and GRUB can launch Windows... From my experience, WindowsXP has pretty much ignored anything about the hardware that the bios has told it (I've disabled HDs, but windows sees them, etc). Could it be possible that GRUB could be installed on a Mac and used to load Windows?
Otherwise both WinXP 64 and Vista support EFI... one could always wait for Vista or illegally grab a beta...
EFI has BIOS emulation, so Windows XP should be able to run on a Mac. We'll see what steps are needed to get it installed. You don't even need a bootloader, since EFI replaces bootloaders.
It's gonna happen. But I'm not interested in that--I'm interested in someone taking advantage of the hardware virtualization in the Core Duos and letting me run Windows in a window on an OS X desktop with no performance hit. Screw dual-booting.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Windows already runs on EFI on some architectures.
I don't jest.
Intel Core Duo is not a 64-bit processor, and does not not support EM64T (x86-64).
The next generation of all of Intel's processors will indeed be 64-bit.
I also emailed Transgaming about Cedega, but so far they still have nothing useful to say.
So I did some research and there is a project doing just this, right now. It's called "Darwine," and they have a developer preview for Darwin-PPC, and are working on a Darwin-x86 version. They seem to be in need of people running Darwin-x86 for testing and development purposes. I can only imagine such people will not be in short supply once the new Intel iMacs start shipping. Mac OS X is not even strictly required, OpenDarwin on x86 will do.
The project:
http://darwine.opendarwin.org/
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
XP has to have the runtime services provided by the BIOS to boot (INT 19h, INT 13h, data tables, etc.). The XP bootloader also starts in "real mode" (think 8086, 1MB memory limit, 16-bit instructions, etc.).
... no Windows XP.
... but Vista EFI might only come in the 64-bit flavor. Apple's current platform is 32-bit only. The current EFI standard (EFI 1.10) doesn't support x64. The upcoming standard (UEFI 2.0) does support x64, but won't boot an x64 OS unless the firmware is 64-bit (runtime calls to the firmware have to match the native platform firmware, and x64 can't make callbacks in 32-bit protected mode ... so 32-bit firmware only boots a 32-bit OS, and 64-bit firmware only boots a 64-bit OS)
EFI doesn't provide any of the BIOS interfaces natively. It also boots up in 32-bit protected mode, which the XP loader can't use.
Any EFI system that can also boot OS from current PCs (XP/DOS/Linux) carries an extra component called the "compatability support module" (CSM). This overlays the BIOS interface onto some EFI implementations, but this is only licensed from a few BIOS vendors.
Apple doesn't need the CSM code to boot OSX, so it's not on their platforms.
No CSM
Vista might work, because it has a native EFI install mode
So Vista would only be viable if (a) Apple makes a 64-bit MacIntelTosh, or (b) Microsoft makes a 32-bit EFI/UEFI version of Vista.