DOS Boot!*

I really thought, the Friday before the EDN Innovation Awards dinner and Embedded Systems Conference, that I'd be down in Cupertino getting briefed on some nifty gadget(s) Apple was introducing the next day to celebrate its 30^th anniversary. Alas, the briefing didn't happen. And it's a good thing the company waited until a few days after April 1^st to make its announcement, or nobody would have believed it (quick aside; two years ago Google unveiled Gmail on April 1^st, and plenty of folks initially thought the company was playing a prank on all of us).

To understand the opportunity for, and the implementation details of, Boot Camp, first recall that Apple's in the midst of a wholesale PowerPC-to-Intel x86 CPU conversion across its product line. If you were to tear apart an Intel-based iMac, Mac mini or PowerBook, you'd find a TPM (Trusted Platform Module)-equipped hardware suite inside that's identical to what's found in modern PCs; CPUs, core logic chipsets, graphics accelerators, internal and external expansion buses, HDDs, optical drives, etc. However, there's one key difference; Apple's systems are based on a next-generation firmware standard called the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), versus the traditional legacy BIOS found in most of today's PCs.

The 64-bit version of Windows XP supports EFI-equipped PCs, but the 'Yonah' CPUs now found in Intel-based Apple systems aren't 64-bit-capable. Microsoft also supports EFI for the Itanium-tailored version of Windows….but there are no Itanium-based Macs, either. And, citing a negligible to-date installed base of EFI-equipped PCs, Microsoft doesn't plan to support EFI in the initial release of its upcoming Vista O/S. Apple system owners wanting to also run Windows on their machines would, at first glance, be SOL. But wait….Gateway sells some EFI-equipped systems that run conventional Windows operating systems. How'd Gateway accomplish this trick? The same way that, as it turns out, the Windows-on-Mac folks did….by employing an (Intel-developed, in this case) EFI-to-BIOS translation layer.

Soon after the first Intel-based Macs started shipping, a group called WinXPOnMac founded by Texan Colin Nederkoorn began collecting funds as reward to the first hacker who figured out how to natively boot Windows on the systems (i.e. not through a virtualization layer running on top of OS X). And, on March 16^th, narf2006 and blanka (Jesús López) claimed the nearly $14,000 prize (narrowly beating out others). The solution developed by them, and later polished, was unfortunately somewhat driver-deficient; among other things, it only supported hardware-accelerated graphics rendering on the Mac mini (i.e. no ATI graphics drivers were available). But it was fast. And it ran multiple Windows variants, plus Linux distros that required a BIOS. Cut to cute JoyOfTech Comic #1.

Roughly three weeks later, Apple released its 'official', albeit for now beta, response; Boot Camp (a move that they 'telegraphed' a few days earlier when they joined BAPCo, and a revisit of an 11-years-ago experiment). A much more polished alternative to the earlier hack achievement, Boot Camp includes Windows driver support for nearly all system peripherals, save a few minor exceptions. Apple claims that Boot Camp requires Windows XP SP2, although pre-SP2 installation is possible and enterprising enthusiasts at the OSx86 Project have also figured out how to install the Front Row competitor, Windows XP Media Center Edition. A GUI applet, working in conjunction with Disk Utilities, shrinks the existing OS X HFS partition and creates a FAT32 or NTFS partition for Windows in the newly-available space. You can select which O/S will automatically launch on the next system boot or, via a keyboard press, you can make your selection during boot. Right now you're only able to launch OS X or Windows (i.e. only two partitions, and two operating systems, are supported). However, by employing LILO, the OnMac gang has figured out a way of triple-booting Linux, OS X and Windows. Cut to cute JoyOfTech Comic #2, and this rib-tickler from Engadget.

Continued with 'The Virtualization Alternative'….

*Another day, another bad pun. See here for my inspiration this time. Sorry, folks, I just can't seem to control myself….