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No EFI Support for Vista
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Mar 10, 2006 04:25 AM
from the apples-and-oranges dept.
from the apples-and-oranges dept.
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."
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Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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One little error. (Score:5, Informative)
I hope you weren't implying that Wine is an emulator because Wine Is Not an Emulator [winehq.com]. ;)
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Re:One little error. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:One little error. (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
Step 1: Buy a mac
Step 2: Buy emulation software
Step 3: Buy an MS operating system
Step 4: Buy applications to run on th MS OS
Step 5: Enjoy the good looks and positive karma of your new mac
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
J.
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.
WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.
But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.
There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.
I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.
If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.
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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?
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Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Funny)
This is good. I don't want to see Macs contaminated with 10 GB of installed rubbish.
Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well.. i guess.. it could be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.geeknet.nl/phpws/index.php?module=anno
has some links on this.
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Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Funny)
You must have one hell of a BIOS.
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Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Informative)
1. Run Program
2. It automagicly Downloads what's needed
3. Click Okay
4. Wait 10 seconds
5. Profit !!! ???
One of the asus boards was a P2B Slot1 (PII 350 100MHz Bus) and a A8V 939 (Athlon64 3000+ @ 200MHz FSB) and ive seen not an issue. Windows won't magicly crash during those 10 seconds and I doubt it really will or else asus won't let you flash from windows.
You guys really gots to get out of the "Windows is unstable" crap. This isn't Windows 98 ive seen desktop XP systems get months and months of uptime without any problems.
For fun I decided to run windows vista and it seems to already be using EFI because it makes a "Boot" directory in both Windows Drives (XP MCE and Vista) and an "EFI" directory containing fonts. So there going to remove the feature from the beta ??
Solosoft
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Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Leader of the pack, not (Score:5, Informative)
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Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?
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Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Funny)
> Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?
Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.
HTH.HAND.
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why not just abstract out the computer? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Interesting)
In the application in question, they had 21 NT hosts running their web apps. In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours. The permanent fix was to run NT under VMWare: the NT instances still failed, but restarting one from a pristine state became a five-second operation.
For a bonus, they picked up enough performance from Linux's paging versus NT's utterly brain-dead paging, that they were able to free all but three of the 21 machines that had been using to other tasks.
The answer to a broken OS is to run it in a penalty box under a working OS.
-jcr
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Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike (Score:5, Insightful)
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Spot on. But there's light in the tunnel ! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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MS Removing features, again... (Score:5, Funny)
Great, yet another vista feature removed before released.
Re:MS Removing features, again... (Score:5, Funny)
Better than being removed after release.
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Vista not to natively support protected mode (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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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?
elilo? (Score:4, Interesting)
If a tree falls in a forest... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?"
Re:If a tree falls in a forest... (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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WTF is EFI? (Score:5, Informative)
A shock, you say... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:A shock, you say... (Score:5, Informative)
Casablanca. [vincasa.com] (1942)
RENAULT (Claude Rains): I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
The croupier comes out of the gambling room and up to Renault.
CROUPIER: (handing Renault a roll of bills) Your winnings, sir.
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Will there be mouse support in Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Seems logical. (Score:5, Interesting)
"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."
Effing Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrors. (Score:5, Funny)
Neither of them was available for comment.
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.
Could you at least TRY to get the story right? (Score:5, Informative)
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!
CLUETRAIN TO THE RESCUE, NEXT STOP IS YOU (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Stupid Question But... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Big whoopdie freakin'-doo. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Bios Work. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Half wrong ! (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
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Re:Macs with windows, blah! Windows with Mac OS! (Score:5, Interesting)
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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