Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, OS
Mac x86 Bios?
If you haven't seen them yet, Apple has officially released the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines. There are some interesting tidbits in here. Most striking, perhaps, is that there's no mention of programming for 64-bit intel chips; the usage IA-32 is applied universally. We're still early in the process, though, and if the Intel chips really are going to hit the consumer products first, there's plenty of time for 64-bit integration. More interesting to me is that the x86 transition will seemingly be a shift away from an open source base. The core OS itself will seemingly continute to be Darwin, but the machines will apparently go back to booting a proprietary BIOS:Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. Although many parts of the IO registry are present and work as expected, information that is provided by Open Firmware on a macintosh using a PowerPC microprocessor (such as a complete device tree) is not available in the IO registry on a Macintosh using an Intel microprocessor. You can obtain some of the information from IODeviceTree by using the
sysctlbyname or sysctl commands.
No word on what the BIOS will be, but I think we can expect one of the standard PC options.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jay Savage said 11:55AM on 6-15-2005
Greg,
It's not quite that bad. You can use BIOS to select the boot disk, and x86 BIOS supported passwords long before Apple even switched to Open firmware.
There are ways to emulate many other Open Firmware functions on x86 boards, too. The question is what functionality will be implemented, how it will interract with the system, and whether it will be open.
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iGore said 11:55AM on 6-15-2005
From what I gather only USB will be bootable as BIOS must not support FireWire.
I wonder what is next? Ditch FireWire for SATA? Actually that doesn't sound as bad. ;-)
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Sk8rCai said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Skibbaaadaaaaaaaaaah!
Wibbblaaahhhh!
Wibbleaaaaah!
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Christophe Andres said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
It might also be that the current Developer Prerelease machines we can rent for $999 are based on current PC hardware. But I don't think that will remain so
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Eric said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
The Appendix A: Rosetta is particularly interesting with regards to what can not be run, and implications for developers.
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KissTheRing said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Could be great for iBooks and PowerBooks. With a Pentium M battery life wouldn't be so short. I know after 3 hours I'm running a bit low on my 15" PowerBook.
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Bryan William Jones said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
This really worries me. What happens to many Mac centric functionalities that are supported in Open Firmware? Things like Firewire "Target" disc mode? What about booting from the CD by holding down the "C" key? What about Netbooting? What about the security offered through Open Firmware? What about all of the innumerable conveniences that are available as a result of Open Firmware. I would hope that Apple writes their own BIOS that supports many of these features.
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el.tremendo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I'm at a loss for understanding Intel's product line. Can someone please point me to a breakdown (in plain English) of where each processor stands in their line? I've been to tomshardware and intel.com (of course), but that was little help because it was mostly just specs. They've got the M, Centrino, D(?) EE, etc. It's all foreign to me. Which is the latest and greatest in x86? What's a good guess on what Macs will be using? I use a dual Xeon box at work to do Monte Carlo modeling of radiation absortion in tissue (sweet!), but those chips won't be making it into Macs, right? As to the topic of this thread--BIOS, I've gotta say that this is one of the things that concerns me most. If Apple ends up with a BIOS like windows has, this will go a long way to shattering the "turn it on and it works" thing that Apple has been so good at. When my centrino lappy is firing up and I see the BIOS, it scares me a bit. Got my first II-plus in 83, or so, and I've been Apple ever since. I don't care what's inside, as long as it doesn't change my user experience.
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Tim J said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
For el.tremendo:
Intel's consumer segment contains the Pentium and Celeron lines. The Celeron is a cheaper Pentium that doesn't have the same features as a Pentium (usually cache or certain extenstions). The D stands for desktop, while M stands for mobile. The EE is the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, and can be compared to Xeons in clockspeed and cache. The Xeon is one of Intel's server processor lines and the most common found of them. The other is Itanium, which has struggled. Itanium and Xeon are the only families which support multiple processors. However, Intel is working toward producing dual-core processors. It is unknown which lines will receive this treatment.
As for the latest and greatest in x86 many believe AMD has it, but Intel has been getting stronger recently.
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teksno said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
i just cant wait till the EMU's come out... the pear pc project will either die, or be completly reborn as the primere emu for osx...I CANT WAIT!!!
custom bios or not, itll will only be a matter of time for the emus...
and eventually china will pop out a few mobos that will run osx nativley...
begun the zombie clone wars have.....
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Greg Deichler said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Does that mean no holding down option to select the boot device? no target disk mode? no open firmware password? What the hell are they doing?!?! Those 3 features are what make a mac a COMPUTER, and a wintel a machine that runs an OS. Change is good, so is a speed bump, but not at the cost of features.
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Mick said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I think I'll be alright so long as I never have to "flash my BIOS." I make fun of people who have to do stuff like that.
That and it just sounds so vulgar and offensive!
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Carsten said 9:36AM on 6-17-2005
I hope the new BIOS will be flashable, so that we can flash something like OpenBIOS (www.openbios.info, OSS OpenFirmware for x86 PCs) into the Intel Macs.
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