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Was EFI a smart move for Apple?

H

hugodrax

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 15, 2007
1,230
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It seems that for the User EFI offers nothing positive.

#1 32/64 Bit issues making it more complex than needed. BIOS users have no concerns.

#2 Difficulty in videocard supply for Apple, EFI cards are the black sheep in the industry, If Apple chose BIOS then apple would never have issues with sourcing the videocards etc.

What makes EFI better than Bios?
 
hugodrax said:
It seems that for the User EFI offers nothing positive.

#1 32/64 Bit issues making it more complex than needed. BIOS users have no concerns.

#2 Difficulty in videocard supply for Apple, EFI cards are the black sheep in the industry, If Apple chose BIOS then apple would never have issues with sourcing the videocards etc.

What makes EFI better than Bios?
Click to expand...
1) The MBR partition scheme that BIOSes use can't boot drives larger then 2.1TB.
2) You can't install Mac OS X on a machine running on a BIOS (Well, at least they thought so).
3) Intel proposed EFI as the modern replacement for the BIOS even for PCs, even if as of now, there are like 2 motherboard which use it.

Just read the EFI-article on Wikipedia.
 
1st, it doesnt matter much for graphic cards, because manufacturers would still have to write drivers

2nd, is doesnt matter much for 64 bit, because it's only the kernel that enables 64-bit from EFI, and 64 bit kernel won't be that advantegous for like 10 more years


trust me, microsoft would go EFI if they could, they are stuck with 20 year old bios crap because it would take a complete windows rebuild to enable EFI.
 
Cindori said:
trust me, microsoft would go EFI if they could, they are stuck with 20 year old bios crap because it would take a complete windows rebuild to enable EFI.
Click to expand...

???

Wikipedia said:
Microsoft introduced UEFI support for x64 Windows operating systems with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Microsoft does not offer support for 32-bit UEFI since vendors did not have any interest in producing native 32-bit UEFI firmware because of the mainstream status of 64-bit computing.[24] Microsoft has released a video with Andrew Ritz and Jamie Schwartz explaining Pre-OS support involving UEFI on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.[25]
Click to expand...

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/uefi_windows.mspx
 
So what is holding up EFI becoming a standard on PC motherboards?
 
Giuly said:
American Megatrends and Phoenix, I guess.
Only thing you can get at the moment are Core2-motherboard with UEFI.
Click to expand...

Actually it's the board vendors that are dragging their feet on changing. AMI and Phoenix would love to move everyone to EFI... better profit margin for them.

Back to the orignial question: Was it a good move for Apple? Well if Apple was looking for a firmware that is difficult to hack then I'd say they got their money's worth.
 
Interesting that this topic came up.

I was playing around with some beta stuff from MS and I wanted to update the BIOS on the old PC. The BIOS file was 2 megs.

The ONLY way to update THAT system was by way of a 1.44MB floppy.

Try that using BIOS.
 
Giuly said:
3) Intel proposed EFI as the modern replacement for the BIOS even for PCs, even if as of now, there are like 2 motherboard which use it.
Click to expand...

Hmm, MSI made some recent noises that was going to change gears :

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/6/8/exclusive-msi-bios-will-be-dead-three-years/

http://www.hardcoreware.net/msi-using-uefi-sandy-bridge/


About 2 years after MSI said they were going to start to transition to UEFI ( EFI at the time ) though. The barrier at > 2TB drives is a problem. [ similar growth was needed to kill off FAT for NTFS over time. At some point the drives got too big for the multiple decade old assumptions present in FAT. ] The board vendors don't need the "disco" UI in some of those pictures though. Something extremely simple will do just fine.


One major problem was in part Microsoft. The mainstream version of XP that most folks used (32-bit XP ) would not boot on UEFI. Now that 32-bit XP is finally dying off there is a WinPC market for UEFI boards. As long as the vast majority if boards were being aimed at XP there wasn't.

At this point the mainstream new system ship is rapidly becoming Windows7 64-bit. That means there is a market now. By the end of the year that should be firmly established as a volume shipping config.


As per the wikipedia article Hyper-V also supports UEFI . If some server boards start picking it up and limited to Hyper-V then VMWare will probably get off the pot and support it too. ( works for Fusion just not in there bare-metal hypervisors . )


It will be interesting for Apple when EFI is less of a defacto dongle. Don't think the hackintosh market really worries them much. As long as individual users have to cobble together their own solution (with help from the web and mail order vendors ) it isn't a big deal. Especially in the light of Mac unit sales growth. As long as growth continues and it is primarily the "users we don't have good product match with in the first place" building hackintoshes with retail copies of Mac OS X they won't care.

If sales go down and there is massive pirating of Mac OS X retail copies then they'll start throwing in gratuitous changes to block folks. They will fork Darwin or start adding deeper internal ID checks.
 
hugodrax said:
So what is holding up EFI becoming a standard on PC motherboards?
Click to expand...

Nothing. Quite a few PC motherboards are EFI. My Pentium 4 board years and years ago was EFI.

The problem really is Windows. Windows didn't support EFI for the longest time... even though it now does, no manufacturers are installing it in EFI mode, and if they did, it wouldn't be backwards compatible with non-EFI hardware in some cases.

Really there just isn't any momentum on the Windows side to move off of EFI. Eventually the wheels will come off of BIOS (like with the 2.1 TB boot drive limit), and there will be a big emergency on the PC side, and everyone will have to switch over. Meantime us Mac users can be smug throughout.

I'm really glad they went with EFI. Going from Open Firmware on the PowerPC to BIOS would have been a massive downgrade. EFI can do everything Open Firmware could, and more.


deconstruct60 said:
It will be interesting for Apple when EFI is less of a defacto dongle. Don't think the hackintosh market really worries them much. As long as individual users have to cobble together their own solution (with help from the web and mail order vendors ) it isn't a big deal. Especially in the light of Mac unit sales growth. As long as growth continues and it is primarily the "users we don't have good product match with in the first place" building hackintoshes with retail copies of Mac OS X they won't care.
Click to expand...

Erm. EFI isn't the only requirement for booting OS X. There are already checks beyond just needing EFI. OS X won't boot on vanilla EFI.

My Pentium 4 box that I already mentioned, for example, could not boot OS X without needing the hackintosh treatment, even though it was EFI (and SSE3).
 
EFI is more commonplace than you'd think, a lot of Sony machines (including the one I'm using right now) use AMI Aptio.. which to my surprise IS EFI. Hahaha. :D
 
As usual, Apple was ridiculously early to the party.

Once you start seeing 2tb drives as commonplace, you'll start seeing the major OEM's using UEFI instead of BIOS. This will push the major motherboard vendors to transition mostly to UEFI, and sites like newegg will have a major glut of UEFI boards.

It's far from an emergency like some would say *cough*goMac*cough*. It's just like Windows existed in a 64 bit form for years without being popular, until all of a sudden computers started coming with 4gb of RAM, and then everyone transitioned. It's the same thing that will happen, only with motherboards instead of OS's this time around.
 
First 3 TB consumer drives are external ...

Anandtech's recent review of the external Seagate 3 TB drive, highlights the reason for EFI (page 2):

My experience with the Intel board and installing Windows with this 3TB Seagate drive pinpoints why we don’t have an internal drive option for the 3TB Barracuda XT: the hardware isn’t ready for it yet. Consumers are used to buying a new hard drive and just sticking it in their system. With the requirements for EFI and GPT, we’re going to need a lot more effort from the motherboard manufacturers and clear messaging from the drive makers to avoid a lot of confusion in the marketplace.
Click to expand...

/ET
 
If Microsoft (who helped co-developed) EFI was more forthright in pushing computer manufacturers to adopt EFI then yeah, I'd say it was a smart move.

I've often wondered by apple went with EFI instead of BIOS. My paranoid nature leads me to believe that the move was done because they could maintain an isolated platform to some degree.
 
tjernis said:
Anandtech's recent review of the external Seagate 3 TB drive, highlights the reason for EFI (page 2):
Click to expand...
Hence my writeup to dismantle them and throw them into iMacs and MacPros.
maflynn said:
I've often wondered by apple went with EFI instead of BIOS. My paranoid nature leads me to believe that the move was done because they could maintain an isolated platform to some degree.
Click to expand...
That's one point, the other one is that OpenFirmware already was more modern than BIOS.
deconstruct60 said:
One major problem was in part Microsoft. The mainstream version of XP that most folks used (32-bit XP ) would not boot on UEFI. Now that 32-bit XP is finally dying off there is a WinPC market for UEFI boards. As long as the vast majority if boards were being aimed at XP there wasn't.
Click to expand...
The Apple-EFI has a BIOS emulation layer, and it runs XP fine via Bootcamp, so this can be ruled out.
 
Giuly said:
Hence my writeup to dismantle them and throw them into iMacs and MacPros.

That's one point, the other one is that OpenFirmware was more modern than BIOS.

The Apple-EFI has a BIOS emulation layer, and it runs XP fine via Bootcamp, so this can be ruled out.
Click to expand...

3tb argument for efi is kinda lame

bios can access up to 2tb on 3tb hdd.

All you need is booter and osx located bellow 2tb barrier, but even then, you can integrate ata driver (its not hard) into booter and use all 3tb+ jsut fine from booter, which could be small enough and be placed in first 2tb of hdd space.

so, a simple solution to this - create gpt on 3tb disk, place smart booter to hiden efi partittion (first 200mb always), and u done, 3tb on bios :p
 
netkas said:
3tb argument for efi is kinda lame

bios can access up to 2tb on 3tb hdd.

All you need is booter and osx located bellow 2tb barrier, but even then, you can integrate ata driver (its not hard) into booter and use all 3tb+ jsut fine from booter, which could be small enough and be placed in first 2tb of hdd space.

so, a simple solution to this - create gpt on 3tb disk, place smart booter to hiden efi partittion (first 200mb always), and u done, 3tb on bios :p
Click to expand...
GPT is indeed the solution, the point is that it's part of EFI. MBR and it's 32Bit-LBA is the bottleneck.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
It's far from an emergency like some would say *cough*goMac*cough*....
Click to expand...

I said eventually it would be an emergency, not that it is one now. :p

Giuly said:
The Apple-EFI has a BIOS emulation layer, and it runs XP fine via Bootcamp, so this can be ruled out.
Click to expand...

The real issue with the BIOS emulation layer (which a lot of PC's are actually using right now), is that as long as people are still using it, vendors have no reason to ship EFI hardware and can continue shipping BIOS hardware.
 
Where is EFI Framework located anyways ?
I know that BIOS is located on a chip onto the Motheboard, is this the case with EFI ?

Other thing I don`t get is how can OS X work with BIOS based systems (Hackintosh) if it`s made for EFI systems. Although hackers modify the kernel, isn`t it supposed to interact with the Framework, instead of directly interacting with the hardware ?
 
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