"I figured out a way to get into the EFI menu on the new Intel iMac. I was attempting to install Vista, which did not work. As I discovered from poking around in the EFI there is no support for UDF or El Torito volumes. It seems only GPT and APM is supported. Writing a driver for EFI to support UDF should be easy enough for someone who knows how, one might even exist already. I'm going to give step-by-step instructions for getting in to the EFI so that some enterprising people will get to work on installing Windows."
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Member since:2005-07-06
The real secret of Apple's plug and play ability is that all that is automatic at the OF/EFI level, instead of the OS level.
I had read that OF/EFI has the ability to provide a generic interface to many hardware components (E.g, if your NIC is supported by OF, then your OS doesn't have to have a specific driver for it, it can just can just use the interface that OF provides). But does Apple use that functionality?
I haven't used OS X at any great length, but descriptions of its hardware detection/plug and play lead me to believe that it is similar to that of BeOS in that respect. In other words, the OS doesn't keep a static list of installed hardware and then look for changes (as Windows seems to), but scans for all hardware on each boot and loads the appropriate drivers. The explanation I'd once heard for why BeOS (and I presume, OS X) is able to do this so quickly is that it directly probes the PCI bus for installed hardware, as opposed to the slower "query the BIOS" method Windows uses.
EFI allows for things Firewire target disk mode. Automatic hardware assignments. Presently it's the OS that has to do those things.
I'm not sure if it's essential for FW target disk mode, though. IIRC, target disk mode was available with the older SCSI, pre-OF Macs (connect powerbook to desktop with SCSI cable, then boot desktop machine from laptop's HDD).
Member since:2005-09-14
Actually in the case of BeOS, it's not entirely this smart; it simply goes through kernel/drivers/bin and loads each driver it finds. The driver in question then probes the PCI bus for any devices it knows how to deal with, publishes them, and unloads. (Driver gets loaded again and stays resident once something actually opens said published node, i.e. when the media_server is started and opens the sound card's /dev node). The reason it tends to be fast is mostly due to the fairly small number of drivers present.
Member since:
2006-01-05
So vista beta doesn't work no big surprise there. Seems like a huge pain to get into EFI what again is the benifit of using EFI?
Um everything. EFI like Open Firmware allows things that bios just can't handle. Modern Bios is still the same basic stuff that IBM invented in the 80's. You need IRQ's and com settings,etc. The real secret of Apple's plug and play ability is that all that is automatic at the OF/EFI level, instead of the OS level.
EFI allows for things Firewire target disk mode. Automatic hardware assignments. Presently it's the OS that has to do those things.