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Intel Macs May Boot Windows XP After All
mister_tim writes "While we'll have to wait till someone actually tries it to get absolute confirmation, news coming from Intel in Australia, reported here by Dan Warne in the Australian Personal Computer magazine, is that the new Intel-based Macs may be able to load and boot Windows XP after all. Several of the early stories after the announcement of the MacBook Pro and the Intel-based iMac assumed that Windows XP would not boot on Intel Macs, since XP doesn't support EFI (replacing BIOS in the new Macs), and Apple's statement that they wouldn't prevent the use of XP on Apple hardware didn't really give people much assurance either way. This statement from Intel implies that there is really no issue."
From the artricle:
However, Intel Australia, while being careful not to comment on Apple's hardware specifically, says motherboards based on the Intel 945 chipset already support EFI and can boot Windows with no problems.
This cryptic statement can't be taken as full reassurance though: it may be that 945 boards support EFI but do not come with it installed by default.
[...]
"For IA 32 systems, the Framework loads itself above the 1MB real-mode memory boundary to accommodate an optional Compatibility Support Module (CSM). CSM implementations can be tailored to platform requirements. A typical CSM is approximately 60KB (~38KB compressed) of firmware that is specific to each Participating Vendor and is based on that Vendor's latest BIOS code base. A contemporary implementation of the Framework on a PC includes a CSM for supplying services to operating systems that do not boot using EFI and for supporting legacy option ROMs on add-in cards. For legacy boot the Framework initialises the platform's silicon and executes EFI drivers. Then control is transferred to the CSM, which supports the legacy OS boot."
So, as long as Apple has included a Compatibility Support Module, Intel-based Macs should be able to boot XP.
It seems unlikely that Apple would have left this out. It has already said it isn't doing anything to prevent Windows from booting on a Mac.
Yes, it's true that EFI has BIOS backward compatibility layer, but it is optional for the vendor to use and provide this. And Apple has no need for legacy BIOS support.
Some further discussion of the general topic of windows booting can be found here: Will an Intel-based Mac run Windows?
The more interesting possibility for many users will not be directly booting or dual-booting Windows XP, but rather running Windows XP at essentially the full speed of the underlying hardware in a virtual machine, right alongside Mac OS X. Sure, for some game and direct hardware access applications, you would want to - or you may have to - boot Windows directly. But for the vast majority of access to Windows productivity and/or other software not available on Mac OS X, running Windows alongside Mac OS X is likely more desirable than dual-booting anyway.
As has been noted, however, it is indeed extremely likely that Windows Vista will directly boot on Intel-based Macs with EFI.
"Apple is finding a way to provide lower prices by jumping on the most popular PC processor company's ability to consistently make quality products are reasonable prices."
No they aren't. They switched processors but are keeping the same prices.
"New Intel iMac: Same models 17 and 20, same prices"
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
for an attempt to have "eternal internet glory" for being the first to get a Production Macintosh to run Window
Supposedly that was already done ten years ago for some Macs, when there was a PPC port of Windows NT.
Supposedly that was already done ten years ago for some Macs, when there was a PPC port of Windows NT.
Yes, I've got one of those boxes in my office (the one on the far left, next to my 128K Mac and NeXT Cube). And indeed, it could run Windows NT for PowerPC. It was a Motorola Viper, a prototype of one of the Mac "clones", and was to be the first shipping Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) machine. In theory, it could run Mac OS, Linux, AIX, Solaris, NetWare, and Windows NT. For various reasons, Solaris and NetWare on PowerPC were killed, as was Windows, eventually. Apple killed cloning (for Motorola's part, Apple bought back their Mac OS license for $100M), and the CHRP machines - or the first clone with the G3, the Motorola StarMax 6000 - never shipped.
What people in general seems to be disregarding is the partitioning-style that the new Intel-Macs are using.
Old Macs use a clean, simple, nice and flexible partitioning-system called Apple Partition Table. PPC-Mac OS can read those disks and boot from them. Intel-Mac OS can read them, but not boot from them (EFI does not like APT). Windows XP can neither read not do anything else with it.
New Intel-style Macs use Intel/Microsofts new GPT, GUID Partition Table. It is a clean, simple and flexible way of partitioning the disks. Intel-Mac OS can read and boot from drives partitioned with GPT. PPC-Mac OS can not boot from them (but it might be able to read them with an update, although Apple says to use APT on all external drives to avoid such issues). Windows XP can read and boot them, but only the 64-bit version of Windows XP.
Intel-PCs of today use MBR-partitioning. The MBR-way of booting and partitioning is a general pain in the butt, but it is what Windows XP (32bit) can understand and boot from.
Of course, there might be a way to make Mac OS boot from MBR-disks, since it did in the developer-intel-version, and so it would be possible to runt Windows XP and Mac OS from the same MBR-partitioned disk, but I would not really feel at ease running my Mac-partition as one of the four primary partitions on the weird old legacy MBR-disk-system.
Anyway. The iMacs with Intel CPUs have been out a couple of days now. Kodawarisan has even posted images of the insides of it, so if it was all that easy to run Windows, why have no one posted any pictures yet?
Of course, there may be a way to get 32-bit windows to boot from GPT-drives. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Mac OS X has three distinct personalities at the kernel level: Mach, BSD, and the I/O Kit. All three live in the same address space. You can communicate with all three from user space (no wrapping involved), and BSD does substantially more than providing interfaces to Mach. The BSD portion provides interfaces to the I/O Kit, the networking core, the filesystem core, various IPC mechanisms... probably other stuff I'm not thinking about right now.
Mach pretty much provides a scheduler, some IPC mechanisms, and a VM system. Out of those, last time I checked, FreeBSD uses Mach VM, and IIRC, NetBSD contains (or at least was working on) an implementation of Mach IPC. :-)
It's fair to say that the core of Mac OS X is BSD, IMHO. It's a stretch to say that the core is a particular implementation of BSD (other than Darwin), but it definitely has a BSD flavor on the whole, IMHO.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.