On Apr 15, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Lawrence Sica wrote: > > On Apr 15, 2011, at 3:02 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: >> >> Another point is that the CSM BIOS Apple is using does not appear to support >> USB booting, whereas their EFI does. So it's not possible for Mac OS >> hardware to be used with "Linux on a stick". And supposedly Windows 8 is >> going to be UEFI only, dropping BIOS. > > Are you sure about this? Everything I've read is that it can boot off of > USB. In fact Apple officially supports it with some specific notes. > http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1948 They only mention windows and os x but I > am sure you could boot linux this way assuming everything is setup correctly.
You can boot off a stick using EFI. The first bullet points out the drive/stick needs to be GPT formatted, that requires EFI. But Windows doesn't support EFI, only BIOS or UEFI. And Linux distros have flakey EFI support, mostly supporting BIOS or UEFI. I can successfully boot Mac OS X from a stick, and text only boot Linux EFI from a USB stick (to command line). But Linux video drivers have various problems when EFI booting and at least the Red Hat and Canonical people, who know more about this than me, say Apple's EFI is non-standard, and they can't get certain hardware information on all Mac hardware reliably. So they're stuck. The work around is not to use USB, use a harddrive or CD/DVD, and use the CSM BIOS booting method instead of EFI. Then the video drivers work. But no USB boot, or large drive support, required hybrid MBR+GPT partition scheme - which inherits the limitations of both MBR and GPT and none of the good. So right now, it's EFI for Apple and OS X. BIOS for everyone else. That's why I'm curious when Apple is going to support UEFI, which Windows supports and so do most of the Linux distros. Chris Murphy_______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
