No EFI Support for Vista 688
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."
Chicken and the Egg? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
says Joseph Heller (Score:2, Insightful)
This could create a cath-22, chicken and egg situation. Less EFI in market causes no EFI support causes Less EFI in market, causes no EFI suport.......
Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:1, Insightful)
I once thought I could get away without 3.5 floppies anymore. I was wrong. Something always drags you back in the end. Flashing BIOS for instance.
Re:Big whoopdie freakin'-doo. (Score:2, Insightful)
Effing Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is everyone bitching? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an updated BIOS specification developed by Intel. Designed for use with trusted computing, it allows vendors to create drivers which cannot be reverse engineered. It also allows operating systems to run in a sandbox, delegating networking and memory management to the firmware. Hardware access is converted to calls to the EFI drivers. The EFI BIOS is used to select the operating system, replacing boot loaders.
I'm not for conspiracy theories but reading the Intel EFI 1.1 spec and looking at how Apple has resorted to locking out XP and requires a separate HFS+ partition to get dualboot Linux on a MacTel [mactel-linux.org]. Luckily Linux can be booted from HFS+ but do you think this will always be the case? EFI could be used in the future to prevent untrusted file systems, operating systems, kernel-level (not just EFI) drivers or apps from making use of a computer. So where are we on this
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody who's used a virtualization product like VMWare knows what I'm talking about. That is where it's at.
One word: Games.
Unless things have changed recently, opengl, directx etc don't work.
Re:What's the advantage of EFI anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
The BIOS is 25 years old. It's 'proven' vs. 'ancient cruft'. It's hardly used as a Basic Input Output System now, just as a system configuration pre-boot interface. Possibly it doesn't even matter about what the pre-boot software is, as long as it boots afterwards!
Apple somehow managed to get their OS booting on EFI without much trouble, during a transition to a new architecture. Microsoft have had twice the time to get it booting on EFI, without that transition, and it still doesn't work. It makes me wonder how tied in to the BIOS current Windows actually is.
Re:Chicken and the Egg? (Score:3, Insightful)
Users have no need for EFI. They take whatever Windows gives them. If they've no experience of what EFI might offer then they are in no position to judge.
MS is after making money out of every aspect of Vista. This includes their programme for signing device drivers and delivering them to customers. If there is an alternate mechanism MS no longer gets its buck. This is bad from a bean counter point of view.
In short: MS makes no extra money by supporting EFI so has no reason to put the work in to make it work.
Shocked? (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Stupid Question But... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Insightful)
Emulation is hard. The Wine project has been started 13 years ago, and they still support only a handfull of applications. Apple has only been able to emulate their past architectures because they owned or licensed all the specifications for them. To emulate Windows would mean to use reverse engineering, which is a whole different ball game, and to expose themselves to potential lawsuits from Microsoft.
Plus, if there's anything to be learned from the whole OS/2 experience it's that perfect emulation of your rival's platform brings no market advantage.
In my opinion, Apple would just use a virtual machine and tell users to run Vista in that. For them, it is the perfect solutions. People would still have acces to their strategic apps on their platform, and there would also be a great incentive to port them to run natively on MacOS.
Re:Chicken and the Egg? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft will have to support EFI in NT 6.0 (consumer version is called Vista) if they are to continue to produce the Itanium [microsoft.com] server version:
Keep Windows off of Mac! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you don't use them, tell me why you need Windows on your Mac...
While accelerated 3D is absolutely critical for some people that run Windows apps, it's not something that most people need - especially if you remove gaming (I do love F.E.A.R., btw) from the equation. At that point, you're basically just talking about people that use 3D modeling apps.
I develop Windows software for a living, but I think OSX is an amazing OS and I prefer to use it when possible and am slowly getting my feet wet with OSX development.
Re:Seems logical. (Score:4, Insightful)
makes no sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Another moot article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats especially true for laptop (Pwerbook, MacBook Pro, iBook) owners, you only sleep the Mac and wake it up when needed.
2) No one having a Mac would boot into Windows, why? Because he likely has no access to his Data on the Mac Partition, no eMails, no Adresses, no Calendar etc. It makes no sense to boot into Windows.
If a Mac user *needs* Windows and wants to use it he uses a Virtual PC or OpenOSX or soon vmware. Of course you use a virtualized PC, because then you don't have to boot, and not to dual boot at least, and you have the advantage to access the data from both platforms on the other platform.
No sane Mac user will use MS Office for Mail (Outlook etc.) and/or IE for browsing but will use his Mac Software for most of his work, so booting into Windows is very unlikely.
angel'o'sphere
Re:Keep Windows off of Mac! (Score:3, Insightful)
And the Windows emulation experience on Intel Macs is already going to improve, both because of the closer-to-native execution and the fact that the Intel Macs won't lag in performance behind PCs like the later-generation PowerPCs did. The result is that Windows apps are already going to be an increasingly viable alternative on Macs. Sure, people will prefer native apps, but so did OS/2 users, which didn't stop places considering their Windows 3.x apps sufficient OS/2 support.
So, dual-booting or not, there's already trouble on the horizon.
* Apple itself claims that Macs have a mean lifespan of 5 years. Apple fiscal years 1996-2000, 17.6 million Macs and 0.5 million Mac clones shipped. Apple fiscal years 2001-2005, 17.0 million Macs shipped. It's a rough estimate, but certainly the Mac software market is at best flat.
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because consoles fill your gaming desires doesn't mean they fill everyone's gaming desires. Tell me which console can play Civ 4. I know the game is probably being developed for the Mac right now, but I already own the Windows version. It would be nice to be able to play it and many of my older PC games on my shiny new MacBook.
I own consoles as well, and I love some of the games that are only available for them. I also love my PC games, many of which don't have a console port, or the port is inferior.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Macs with windows, blah! Windows with Mac OS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Games. Dual-boot to Windows to run games.
Apple has been a software company since the Mac came out. They're just a software company that makes their money selling hardware, like Cisco. And if they had Cisco's market share they'd be smart to stick with that model. I don't see anyone pushing Cisco to sell IOS for Wintel hardware.
Since they don't, though...
Re:Could you at least TRY to get the story right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the advantage of EFI anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, and e-SATA is much better than either. Yet people are using USB2 in droves, and not FW or e-SATA, because it works fine for them and about every computer they encounter understands it. 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?
Because there are far more people with USB2 than FW HDs. Because USB2 enclosures are cheaper and work well enough for the majority. Because if you carry around a USB2 HD it's far more likely that it will work in any random computer you encounter than a FW enclosure.
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?
What specific advantage has this bought to the Mac? All the PPC Mac operating systems still have to provide their own drivers (Airport Extreme anyone?). Can you come up with some real world examples of the usefulness of the OF console on a Mac? The niftiest thing I've seen, FW target mode, still isn't nearly as flexible as booting a target PC (or even Mac) with a Linux live CD.
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.
No, a 4 year old PC certainly won't run OSX it faster than any Mac. But anyone with a DTK knows that a 3Ghz P4 will run it about as well as a G5, which is faster than the majority of the Macs in use. No, it won't fit on a USB stick, the install requires a 6Gb partition. You don't have to believe any AC. You could just Google for a torrent of 8f1099, burn it on a DVD and install it on just about any P4 PC on an Intel board based on a 845 or newer chipset. Of course, that would be illegal so you won't do that, but pretending that the whole forum on osx86project.org is one big hoax is silly.
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?
Why go 64-bit? To directly adress more than 4Gb virtual memory. To work with large datasets. To get rid of the limiting kernel/user space split.
Why get more RAM? Bigger hard drive? Because people keep writing applications that require more memory. Because people are working with larger video and image files.
Why go EFI? Yes, why?
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.
Talk about hot air, what are the pros (and cons if you will) of going with EFI? In your whole rant you haven't mentioned a single advantage of EFI.
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh. absolutely no coincedence with IBM there then...
Re:Late to party (Score:3, Insightful)
While I am disappointed that Vista won't have WinFS at launch either, Vista will offer developers an unprecedented level of customization and control over how their application looks from their WinFX presentation layer. Most people thinks its just eye candy that Vista is offering, but the API's being offered will allow for Flash like animation adding more dynamics and richness to applications that NO OTHER OS can boast yet, even OSX. From a programmers perspective, Vista is bringing a lot to the table.
One word: VirtualPC! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
He Made It Up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the w3schools site [w3schools.com], As of Feb2006, market share is approximately:
Most notably, the overall share of Mac and Linux have grown steadily while Windows has shrunk at about the same rate. I agree that I doubt MS decided not to support EFI based solely on the new Intel Mac strategy, but marketshare analyses are not the way to point it out.
The point comes down to this: MS would benefit by allowing Mac hardware to boot Windows. A copy sold is a copy sold. Besides, MS already sells a Mac version of Virtual PC with a Windows license for hardly more than just a copy of Windows itself, so it's clear that they have no issue with people running Windows on Mac hardware.
I'm more willing to bet that EFI support is just one more vaporware feature that MS ran out of time to implement for Vista. Every time I hear of yet another Vista feature being axed, I have to wonder if anyone will care about Vista when its released -- what will it actually do for us?
Re:Don't believe everything you read from winehq (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:1, Insightful)
Bingo! you win the prize for the most clueless comment of the day.
With that single line I think you get the prize.
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to make an unbiased call for people to stop flaming fires. Apple makes good products. Some people don't like them and think they are too pricy. Others like the polish, that they work well, and don't mind paying more since they see compensation in other areas. Can we just give up on all this. It has been going on for about 6 years now, and it's just time to stop. Yea linux is great, yea OS X is great; yea there's substatial differences but all of us are smart enough to investigate those and make an educated decision.
anyways i'm out, maybe i'll stop reading slashdot now, i don't know.
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:3, Insightful)
What, you mean Apple's computer sales were kinda flat in the quarter where everyone knew that a few months later there would be machines that will be a minimum of 2x faster than the current machines, and that third-party software support for current machiness, due to major hardware changes, would be in question ?
What's shocking about last quarter for Apple is that anyone at all was still buying PowerPC machines from them. IMHO, last quarter's finanicals for Apple say a lot more about the complete and total dominance of the iPod than anything else.
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:0, Insightful)
From Winehq.com [winehq.org]
This is the Wine Application Database (AppDB). From here you get info on application compatibility with Wine.
There are 3717 applications currently in the database
I suppose that's what you call a handfull... Either you have very big hands or you just won clueless points for yourself.
As for the 13 years.... Wine IS here and thats why such a compatibility layer, if supported by Apple, would not be far away. But compatibility layers are only one form of emulation amongst others. These 13 years are an asset as is experience earned over time, not something deterrent.
As for Virtual machines it all depends on your situation. If you're a business longing for Mac productivity and ease of use and maintenance in your office but can't swith due to some pieces of software you don't necessarily want the performance and financial hit of adding a whole OS, a whole set of licences and a whole lot of configuration whoes to your system.
On the other hand, running SAP GUI or an accounting software in the same environment as your Mac office suite may appeal quite a bunch of persons.