Possible booting directly into Mac w/o chameleon using UEFI

[upton_oliver]

In theory, it is possible to boot mac with efi on a pc. UEFI has the ability to run an efi shell, in which the apple hfs drivers could be loaded along with all other drivers reguarding support for mac computers. It is not like said shells do not exist. IBOOT by OS_Ninja (not tony's) and XPC by iPhoneTom are UEFI emulators which boot into an efi shell from which they load the mac efi drivers, then load into mac os. With these UEFI boards, an efi shell program, and uefi compliant graphics cards we could boot exactly like a mac with no worries of compatibility issues in future os'es. In addition, this would provide native resolution at boot and the ubiquitous mac chime. As for everyone who claims apple uses a corruption of efi, that is not true because they may have removed some features we would like to see, but their firmware is still EFI 1.10 compliant.

 

[elvenpure]

So I don't really get all of that but why don't people do that?
It sounds fool proof really. Is there a reason it's not used like that?

 

[JoshNYC]

Ah yes, the holy grail.

 

[upton_oliver]

The only thing required is to put the efi shell program into a supplemental FAT partition as any non apple UEFI board most likely lacks drivers for hfs. I thought that the protective EFI partition would do, but i believe a hackintosh would require it untampered for true EFI bootup. I might be building a Sandy Bridge system soon and selling my current x58 system. If I do, i will get a UEFI board so that I can test this theory. Also with this, there will be no need for things such as graphics enabler or creating efi strings because they are generated by default. The reason we lack implementations like this is because we have had UEFI widespread for only 6 months.

 

[mz123]

sounds really interesting, hope you will be successful

 

[hexdump]

I would post this on insanelymac too, in order to see what "other gurus" say. Perhaps they could confirm your thoughts.

Thanks in advance, and good luck with your project.

 

[upton_oliver]

Actually, iPhoneTom and OS_Ninja's implementations of efi bootloaders into Mac prove this being possible. They are all based on a project that intel started, called TianoCore. This was intended to add a UEFI layer atop one's existing BIOS. So iPhoneTom and OS_Ninja's modules and prebootloaders could be used with UEFI boards today.

 

[theshiv]

It's been a while...did anything ever come of this?

 

[upton_oliver]

Not yet, but I still need to get my hands on some uefi hardware and see if i can't get the shell program with efi drivers to start. Most gfx cards don't support efi and the ones that do are expensive, but netkas has a bios/efi merger that makes a bios and efi compliant rom to flash your device with. Pretty neat.

http://netkas.org/?p=943#comments