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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."
Except for hedging your bets. Why not wait at least a week, possible less. I am sure There are Thousands of people who will soon get their iMacI and try to install XP on it and post it for an attempt to have "eternal internet glory" for being the first to get a Production Macintosh to run Windows, along with other people who don't want to get outdone who will Try to have x86 Linux installed, with vmware that will run Windows, and possible OS X(But unlikely until...), then I give 1 month for them to figure out how to get OS X to run on normal PC hardware, and Vmware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
Will it boot up TRSDOS or CP/M?
I like my machines old school.
Real old.
Wish I had moderator points to mod this up to out of sight.
y'all
Other than that, what is the point of running XP on a Mac/Intel box? To be cool?
So that we can play CounterStrike.
Every time we get a story of the form "I hacked A to run on B" or "I hacked C to do E", somebody always asks whether it wouldn't be more cost effective to buy something off-the-shelf. The answer is almost always "yes". Even if the hacker is saving money on hardware, he's expending a lot of his well-paid time. But that just doesn't matter.
A good hack is pretty much an end in itself. It might satisfy the hacker's curiousity, or improve his professional skills. Or it might add some minor functionality that the hacker's geeky priorities can't live without. But these are all secondary goals. The big goal is a sense of accomplishment, of having done something special. Asking a hacker why he doesn't just buy an off-the-shelf solution is like asking a Marathon running why he doesn't just call a cab.
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.
The joke was on life support when it was born, but you just killed it.
Poor Willy. For want of an emoticon, Shakespeare's works were lost. If only he could have written:
Just think of the treasures we've discarded because humans can't recognize irony or humor!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.