[TriLUG] Linux and EFI

[John Wheeler]

Thats exactly right. Bootcamp in and of itself is just some  
convenience software. The firmware update is a BIOS toolkit for the  
EFI bootloader to allow other operating systems to be easily  
installed and managed at boot.

This functionality update was probably going to be saved for 10.5  
Leopard but the hacker community was having so much success in it's  
efforts to boot Windows on the Macintels that Apple stepped up to  
make sure they maintained control of the boot process. (That is the  
common assumption anyway... I buy it.)

Just for a bit of paranoia... some users have reported voiding  
Warranty if you run bootcamp.
I don't personally think there's any merit to this but just FYI heres  
the discussion on Apple Discussions.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2090507&#2090507

Keep it in mind.

John Wheeler

On Apr 7, 2006, at 4:19 PM, Ian Meyer wrote:

> The main thing that Boot Camp does isn't enable the booting of  
> Windows, its assisting you in making a Windows driver disc to  
> support most of the hardware such as graphics and wireless. The  
> support for booting comes within the new Firmware upgrades for each  
> Intel Mac model, that add what we (me and some friends) suppose is  
> the BIOS toolkit for EFI. This allows EFI to present itself to the  
> OS as BIOS, thus the OS does not need to have EFI support, it  
> doesn't even know its running atop an EFI system.
>
> As Warren pointed out, linux "in" Boot Camp has been done already,  
> however, even before that, within EFI (http://www.mactel-linux.org/ 
> wiki/Main_Page)
>
> hth,
> ~Ian
>
>
> On Apr 7, 2006, at 3:24 PM, Rick DeNatale wrote:
>
>> I note that Apple just announced that new versions of OS/X will
>> include something called "boot camp" which will allow booting Windows
>> on intel-macs which use the new Intel "Extensible Firmware Interface"
>> instead of BIOS.
>>
>> http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
>>
>> This got me to wondering about booting Linux on these machines, and
>> the state of EFI support for Linux.  Grub is pretty much tied to the
>> BIOS model, and I don't have any direct experience with lilo.
>>
>> EFI support seems to be a feature of Grub 2 which appears to be in an
>> early stage of development, and there also seems to be an elilo, but
>> the project web page seems to be broken.
>>
>> Any insights?
>>
>> --
>> Rick DeNatale
>>
>> Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
>> http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/
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