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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.
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?
Better than being removed after release.
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'!!
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
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.
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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.
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.
I for one was counting on the rumors that my new mac mini would be able to run windows. Why? Games. Although it'll take more than just EFI to play games in M$ Windows on an intel mac (drivers etc.), EFI is an important step towards that goal.
You're obviously not a Windows user, nor a gamer, since the ONLY use of Windows is to play games anyway. Maybe view pr0n as well, but you can do that better on a Mac already...
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.)
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)
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)
I hope you weren't implying that Slashdot posters are pendantic.....oh, wait, you were.
And, on that note, it's "pedantic." I know, because the last time I misspelled it "pendantic" on Slashdot, I had a good five or six replies correcting me...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.