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No EFI Support for Vista
DietFluffy writes "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."
"If you won't let us boot yours, we're not gonna let you boot ours either! Hehehe!"
Well, Microsoft has always been a slow adapter of everything. USB was late, even a GUI came late. There is still support for floppy disks... no surprise here.
This is good. I don't want to see Macs contaminated with 10 GB of installed rubbish.
I'm not at all excited by the idea of shutting down my computer just to use another operating system.
Anybody who's used a virtualization product like VMWare knows what I'm talking about. That is where it's at.
You can run another operating system in a window without leaving your current OS. It's not an emulator in any traditional sense of the word; things run at (or a few percent shy of) native speed. The only downside is that you need enough RAM to run both operating systems simultaneously in a comfortable fashion, but 2GB of RAM is under $200 these days.
I'm going to buy an Intel Mac as soon as VMWare releases an OSX version of VMWare or an open-source implementation reaches that level of quality (there are some strong contenders). I'm willing to put down the cash to run Windows on an Intel Mac, but dual-booting isn't even part of the equation.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
"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."
Great, yet another vista feature removed before released.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Quote from the article: "It said its decision to 'reprioritise'[sic] EFI development to the server version of Windows was based on a lack of available desktop PCs with EFI support on the market."
Maybe the reason that there are no desktop PCs with EFI support is because everyone knows that Windows still only boots on BIOS. If Microsoft was serious about jump-starting a move to EFI (or any other alternative) they would support it now, and watch the hardware follow.
I wonder if this is due to laziness, maliciousness, or a combination of both?
I guess this means that someone is going to have to hack a Linux bootloader to boot Windows. Maybe something with elilo. It's be kinda cool for these guys to say, "Sure. You can run Windows on an Intel Mac. You just gotta install Linux first!"
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
Sounds feasible to me...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
And does this really come as a suprise to anyone anyway? "Oh my God! Someone tries to update the x86 architecture in a meaningful way and Microsoft arrives late to the Party: Drunk, kicking, and screaming! Who knew that might happen?"
For those of us who DON'T have a BN acronyms in a LUT in our heads, EFI means "Extensible Firmware Interface". Read up on Wiki.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Simple really - because OS X is still lacking in certain software.
...Hang on...Did I just use the words "performance" and "windows" in the same sentence? I need more sleep....
The OS is great. Really. The hardware is a bit overpriced, yes but let's face it, it *is* oh so desirable!
But there is still a ton of software out there that doesn't come in OS X flavour. Notably games.
And to get the absolute maximum performance for Windows games, you'd want to dual-boot, not use some VMware system.
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not /. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.
:-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.
;-).
:-).
Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense
I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for
BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me
Regards,
Jo Meder
I'm really worried now! It seems like almost every feature boasted in Vista has been pulled. Database filesystem and all that? What will be left that isn't essentially Windows XP with a much larger greed for memory and other hardware requirements?
Supporting EFI would be supporting competition. Incentive to abandon Microsoft.
"I want a computer that's good for gaming and graphics. Either PC or the new Intel Mac, which I'd dual boot, OS X for gfx, Vista for games."
EFI supported:
"So, supposedly Mac is better for gfx than PC, let's try it... Wow, this OS X rocks and Vista sucks. I'm gonna get a PS3 for games and drop Vista altogether, staying with OS X."
EFI not supported:
"Well, there is Photoshop for Vista and no games for OS X, so I'd better buy a PC so I have both games and photoshop. Well, it sucks, but I bet OS X would suck just the same if I ever tried it."
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
How about you read up about it before just dismissing it out of handI nterface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_
OS independant device drivers sounds like a big plus to me. No more complaints about how your ATI card runs like crap under linux.
As I understand it, one of central features of EFI was the hardware level encryption and digital signing happening between core motherboard components, an intergral part of the Trusted Computing Platform implementation - which Windows Vista was supposed to fully support? If Vista has to use the old BIOS architecture is there hope still for freedom or is there another way to tie us onto the TC-shackles?
And does this mean Apple's products will be the only ones that fully implement the TC platform idea both in hardware and operating system level. I seem to remember the Macintosh launch involved an ad related to the year 1984, can't seem to remember exactly what it was about (mind blanked out)...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions. I don't know why Gates doesn't throw in the towel and announce that from now on the chair of Microsoft will be held on a rotating basis by the chairs of the major Hollywood studios. All Microsoft seem to be doing these days in the consumer market is kowtowing to the content providers while trying to grab a slice of the action for themselves. Microsoft offer no vision, no inspiration or feel-good factor. It's a pathetic end to the dream of a computer on every desk. What we have instead is a glorified credit card processor.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Adding EFI support would allow people to run dual boot Windows and OSX on Apple hardware the next time they purchase a computer.
Worse case for Microsoft would be that they try OSX, like it and then gradually migrate across to it.
If they don't support EFI, then there is no good and legal way of running both on one machine. You could use software based solutions, but none of them are as good as a dual boot machine.
As such, if you want to jump from Windows to OSX, it requires significant cash investment - something which a lot of people (myself included) aren't prepared to do.
</tinfoil hat>
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If you read an article about the PC boot process (been on /. long time ago), you'd see the drudgery of climbing up the ladder of legacies to bootstrap a PC with BIOS.
Even if you have two dual-core Athlons 64, you start with a single CPU in 286-compatiblity mode. You need to climb all the way up, starting with ancient 8-bit instructions to enable 16-bit, get out of the 640K memory limitations, floating math co-processor, pull all the hardware from legacy compatiblity modes (all gfx cards by default start in CGA mode, year 1981) enable all extras that were not supported by 486 and similar, and slowly, slowly crawl your way up to a level where a dual 64-bit CPU is a dual 64-bit CPU, not a hyper-overclocked 386.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What you describe is an optional module for EFI already.
Apple just chose not to include it, for the obvious reason that they don't need it.
I expect standard bootloaders in the free software world will all support EFI by the end of this year, if they don't already. I don't know if you'd need an EFI-specific live-CD / install CD too for CD installs.
As most owners will be 'traditional' mac users, I don't think this is a real issue.
The article also reads: Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It just shows that Microsoft doesn't understand true concepts of usability, innovation and excellence. As most Windows users enjoy crippled systems, using Mac OS X will come as relief to those who dare to swap. Unless you're gaming all day...
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
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."
Neither of them was available for comment.
Soory, but will not be a bad idea if you read an 80386 users' manual...
286 processors and up start in what is know as real-mode. like the original 8086. That is the 16 bit mode.
There is not 8 bit mode (not any more, and I think that was only available in the nec v20 AFAIK).
VGA cards do not start-up in CGA mode. They are initialized by the VGA BIOS in text mode, compatible to CGA but is not the same because 480 vertical lines (plus retrace) are used instead of 200 plus retrace.
BTW, newer graphic cards don't even support all C/E/VGA modes anymore, and I think that has benn for almost for 8 years more or less.
I don't think that the setup of the protected mode should be done in BIOS, but some useful mode (better than the crappy real-mode) should be enabled.
May be some flat mode (32 or 64 bits).
On the other hand, you don't enable more than protected mode, the "features" are always available (but maybe just in protected mode the instruction don't produce illegal opcode... I don't know that.)
The more I think about it the more I think that if Microsoft ever provides official support for installing Windows natively on a Mac then it very likely will be the end of MacOS X and eventually Apple.
Why? Because in general developers want "one true" operating system to develop for, often religiously so. I have heard people tell Mac users to "just get a PC" to run popular Windows-only software, but that is not a realistic expectation. That would be asking the Mac user to throw away thousands of dollars of hardware, and is generally considered unreasonable.
If it ever becomes possible to easily install any version of Windows on a Mac in a manner that is supported by Microsoft, even if not by Apple, then these same people will demand that Mac users "just install Windows" to run their software. And they will consider that to be perfectly reasonable thing to do - they are adding something to they system and taking nothing away. They could afford an expensive Mac, so certainly they can afford to spend a few more buck for Microsoft Windows, right? And if it is running natively on the Mac rather than in VirtualPC developers will not worry that they might be making the users work in a crippled or limited environment.
Then in time no one will see the need to develop MacOS X applications any more and all Mac users will be forced to use Windows.
Apple will then be just another boring commodity PC maker like Dell or Gateway.
So let's please stop even thinking about running Windows on the Mac. It just isn't cool.
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There is no need to by RAM from Apple. When I bought by G4 Powerbook, and RAM-Upgrade from Apple would have cost me 800 Eur or so - instead I bought two Kingston 1GB SO-DIMM modules for 140 Eur each (at that time) and they work just fine.
This is ridiculous! The story is, the crippled (I am amazed they are even releasing it) 32-bit version of Vista won't support the odd mac-only combination of 32-bit chips, and EFI. The 64-bit version of Vista, will support the standard configuration of 64-bit chips, and EFI, just like XP 64 already does.
I love all the comments about how far behind Apple MS is, as proven by the fact that they can't even get EFI working. No, they have it working, just on modern 64-bit systems. Apple is the only company on earth that decided to go with a brand new technology like EFI, and then stick 32-bit chips on a 32-bit OS in their system! If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64-bit Vista will boot on it just fine. This is one of those cases where the problem isn't how far behind MS is on their support for EFI, but how far behind Apple is on their choice of x86 chips. I have no idea why Apple let itself get talked into dumping a 64-bit architecture, just to get what basically amounts to some fast dual-core P3s, but they did.
Talk about the very definition of FUD!
Redmond - In a surprising turn of events Microsoft held a press conference yesterday stating that Windows Vista will not support the 32 bit mode of Intel 80386 and compatible processors. When asked about why this feature was left out from the release lead coder Alfred E. Newman replied: "We felt that 32 bit support was just not ready for Vista. The NT line of operating systems is still too cutting-edge to be used in the productivity powerhouse that Vista is going to be." Instead, Microsoft will deploy a new version of MS-DOS as the operating system's foundation. The new DOS, called "MS-DOS 2006" will feature improved support for TSRs and the capability of automatically loading supporting programs directly into extended memory, allowing it to have all 640 kilobyte of conventional memory ready for applications that depend on it.
Microsoft promised that all other proposed Vista features (except for those already canceled) will "have a chance of making it into Vista". When asked about whether customers coud be expected to put up with Vista's proposed 480 installation floppies Newman replied: "What, me worry?"
The new decision was universally met with conetempt within the Apple world. "They think that pushing the MS-DOS version number from 7 to 2007 is a big step," Random MacGeek from AppleRumorsUpYourButt.com commented, "but we clearly had the biggest version number jump when Bungie went from Marathon 2 to Marathon: Infinity. Microsoft is late to the game, as always."
When asked about the topic of Microsoft being late to the game Apple replied: "It's true! Microsoft promides to buy me and GNU here a beer at the game. Now it's halfway over and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen!" "We're not going to invite Microsoft to the next game," GNU added, "we have better things to do with our time than to spend it waiting for some guy from Redmond."
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Hilarious stuff.
USB is meant for keyboards and mice. USB2 is meant for larger data transfers that are not sustained. Firewire is meant for sustained bulk data transfers.
USB2 is a crap way to boot your OS. Firewire will show much better performance. All Macs shipped in the last five or six years can boot from an external Firewire disk. Why should anyone want to boot from USB2?
Although some people might enjoy running their system like a piece of crap.
Who ever uses the Forth interpreter in Open Transport? Exactly the people it's meant for - device driver writers and system engineers. Do you think it's there for you?
And yes, I certainly believe some anonymous guy on the Internet when he spins out stories of old PCs running pirated OS X booted off USB devices. Maybe it was booting off a USB 1.0 pen drive, you know, a 32MB one. And maybe the PC ran it faster than any Mac. Maybe he found that at his freelance gig the Mac took 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file.
Lastly, if all the BIOS had to do was point the OS to the hard drive's boot sector, no PC on Earth would boot. It contains a lot of garbage that was useful 10-20 years ago but is irrelevant now. Why go EFI? Why go 64-bit? Why get more RAM? Why get a bigger hard drive? Why move forward in technology in any way at all?
I'm so glad that people like you don't make decisions. You'll be relegated to the sort of jobs where you don't get that choice, hopefully. When you actually look at issues, and understand the pros and cons, your opinion may carry some weight. Right now it's just hot air and fluff.
I hope you weren't implying that Wine is an emulator because Wine Is Not an Emulator. ;)
Join Tor today!
Windows supports EFI. Here, now, today. Has been for years. Currently is. Except only on the IA64 architecture. This makes the article partly bullshit, and a large amount of comments here as well. But the bullshit doesn't stop here.
Of course the thing about drivers being stored entirely in EFI is completely false, misleading and somewhat retarded (it really depends on how twisted your idea of drivers is. If you come from a Linux background there's a 9 in 10 chance you are clueless and forever jaded about it). Of course the DRM comments here don't make the slightest sense, since TPM chips are here, now, have been for years, and they work with the old, usual, actually-existing BIOS extensibility interface (i.e.: drop a function pointer somewhere, get called). Have you bought an IBM laptop or workstation that was made some time after the Cretacean? congratulations! your cute little black box is Trusted Computing compliant (r), (c) and (TM)!
From a more technical point of view: Windows doesn't depend on legacy hardware. It used to, in ye olden days (until before Windows Server 2003 R1), but it was so easy to get around it with software emulators (provided by Microsoft herself, as part of Windows NT 4 Embedded, Server Appliance Kit for Windows 2000 Server, et cetera) that only people with a really small penis complained. Nowadays it's a matter of the right boot loader and Hardware Abstraction Layer (all aboard the cluetraaain! if you are among the differently-endowed mouth breathers who confuse "instruction set" with "hardware" - and you know if you are one - this might just be your chance to finally get it!).
Technical trivia: the Windows boot loader is a beauty. It totally mops the floor with anything in the wild, save maybe for Grub. The horrid ntldr flat executable is just a teeny weeny stub containing the real thing, a PE executable called osloader.exe (with a resource section, even - the description simply says "Boot loader"; sadly it has no icon) which is the universal loader - why, yes, your humble peecee can network-boot too! In short, the little bugger comes with a full SCSI+ATAPI stack (it can even stay loaded and be used by the kernel as the SCSI class driver - no shit!), a network stack for the TFTP client (yep) and its very own hardware abstraction layer, since the thing was written against ARC (think EFI, only for the Alpha AXP architecture) which is only really available on Alpha. The thing is a driver model short of a full operating system
So, reconsider the length of your penis in the light of these new facts
Make a difference - use Windows! (open source clone of Windows NT)
The problem with this idea, is that the MB manufacturers would have to license EFI from Intel. Intel developed EFI, and at present is the only one using EFI. So, the only way you end up with EFI right now is if you have an Intel MB. As far as all the MB manufacturers are concerned, EFI adds nothing substantial of value to a desktop machine, so why pay a competitor like Intel to license their technology, when Award makes a fine BIOS that does everything a desktop user would need, and then some?
If it weren't for macheads wanting to install Vista on their machines, this wouldn't even be a news story. Intel is more than capable of writing the code Vista needs to boot in whatever way Intel wants it to. If Intel had convinced any OEM but Apple to go EFI with 32-bit chips, then Intel would just hand over the code to MS, and the whole problem would be solved. Besides, every EFI MB out there has a BIOS compatibility mode, which Apple decided they didn't need. This truly is a lot of FUD that only effects Apple. The issue here is that MS doesn't want to put in extra work just to get Vista to boot on a Mac, Intel apparently doesn't either (or has been asked not to by Apple) and Apple sure as hell doesn't want to, which is the whole reason they went with EFI without a compatibility mode to begin with. Right now, EFI only exists in some 64-bit systems, and Macs. I guarantee you, that if tomorrow Intel talked Dell into going EFI with 32-bit CPUs, Vista would support it in whatever configuration Dell needed.
Steve Jobs actually tried this with NextStep, and learned a painful lesson. While NextStep was heralded for its stability and features on the Next hardware, as soon as it was "out in the wild" on commodity hardware, it was pretty much panned as a buggy, slow, cumbersome piece of garbage that never really sold or gained any major following.
There were a few reasons for this.
First off, the people who went out of their way to buy a Next box, much like macheads, had already decided that it was a wonderful machine before they ever turned it on, so were a bit more forgiving than someone just trying out the OS alongside others.
Secondly, it is a lot easier to develop an OS that only needs to run on one or two motherboards, with one or two chips, and one or two graphics systems, than it is to develop something that has to work with everything.
Thirdly, if you have complete control of the hardware, you can cheat on a lot of things. For example, if you know a feature crashes horribly on anything under a certain amount of RAM, then you can hold back that feature on any system that doesn't have enough RAM to handle it. When the user has control of the hardware, all you can do is make recommendations, and hope they abide by them, which almost without doubt, some won't.
Lastly, the number of bugs and problems you have to fix is limited to the number of users that have problems. Every piece of software as complex as an OS has bugs, if you have a few thousand users, the chances of them running across all the bugs is a lot smaller than if you have tens of thousands of users.
All of this, at the very least, taught Steve Jobs that trying to be Microsoft is harder than it looks. I think that Apple would probably make a ton of money if they could release their OS as a software product for commodity PCs, and would probably put a HUGE dent in the Linux market. However, I don't know if the company is really up to handling that, and I am quite sure that from his Next experience Jobs realizes the danger of trying to make that move when you aren't ready for it.
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start linux, start vmware in linux, start XP, start vmware in XP, start linux on vmware on xp on vmware on linux, then you can unplug the iMac and carry it off leaving the operating syatems hanging in mid-air in an endlessly self-supporting loop.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I've got a PowerBook at the moment, and will definitely be upgrading to a Macbook Pro in the near future. Being able to run MS Windows on it at (near) native speed would be a huge bonus for me, but I've got zero interest in dual booting to get that. I don't give a rats ass about running games under windows; I hardly have enough free time in my life to play WoW on my PowerBook more than a few times a week (without getting into trouble with my other half).
...... QEMU + Accelerator seems to be the only choice for Intel OSX right now. VMware are apparently showing interest (but nothing solid yet) and another outfit called iEmulator.com are supposed to have an Intel port of their existing Mac OSX product in the pipeline.
:-)
What I really need it for is those work occasions where I run into equipment that needs a dedicated Windows app to manage it, and dual-booting to deal with that is just stupid. I need a good native virtual environment I can just fire up in a minute, do my work and then close it down. VPC on PowerPC just doesn't cut it. It's way too slow.
The things I'm keeping an eye on
If Xen worked I'd be delighted, but there seem to be problems that are going to take some time to work out. 1) there is no Intel VT support in the current Intel Mac's, and 2) Moshe Bar has said that "OS X has its own virtualization technology that interferes with Xen". Apparently he's been able to get FreeBSD and Debian working, but Apple's protectiveness of its hardware specs has so far prevented Bar from getting the graphics, sound or Wi-Fi to work.
So it's really only a matter of time
Elilo is probably your best bet. It does Linux on macs and there is no reason I can think of why you should be able to boot another os with it. I will have to wait to figure it out cuz the macbooks are in horribly short supply in my neck of the woods..
u nce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=95
http://www.geeknet.nl/phpws/index.php?module=anno
has some links on this.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
XP already supports EFI booting
No XP doesn't support EFI booting, Windows 2003 64 bit does at this time. The Gateway system has EFI _with_ legacy BIOS support allowing XP to boot on it.
This is actually playing out exactly as I predicted. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to boot any of their OS's on a MacBook Pro or any other Intel-based Mac, because doing so would mean the slow "death by irrelevance" of their VirtualPC product they bought from Connectix a few years ago.
The beauty of forcing a Mac user to run Windows through the VirtualPC product is Microsoft can sell them a legal software license bundled with the product, making it an easy "one stop" way to collect the entire revenue stream. If they simply coded booting support for EFI on MacBooks into Vista, they'd encourage a lot more piracy. (How many Mac users do you know who despise Microsoft - and would justify running a bootleg copy of Vista in dual-boot mode as "So what? It's not really my primary OS anyway, and Microsoft doesn't need to get any more of MY money!"?)
On the flip-side, the next version of VirtualPC will be able to completely drop all the x86 emulation code, and simply become a "sandbox" that fools a Windows OS into booting up inside of it, and then passes all the x86 instructions to the Intel-based Mac's CPU natively. This will let them brag about the incredible performance boost in the latest version of VirtualPC, etc. etc.
The only thing I'm not sure about is if MS will decide to simply drop support for PPC based Macs at some point, keep both VirtualPC 7 and this new "version 8?" version as branded for "Intel Macs only", or actually code all of it together, so the traditional PPC emulation stuff is automatically installed/used where needed, and the alternate code for Intel-based Macs used where possible?
But I'd practically bet money on one of these scenarios panning out.