442 replies to this topic

[TheZigPC]

I am constantly looking / checking up on this and dug deep into EFI information,  Soon enjough I will educate myself enough to contribute.

[tyre777]

hi guys... well im just pretty confused with EFI, doesnt any board load up the appleEFIruntime.kext? umm the reason im asking (well actually a pretty noobish question) is that my lappy based on a 915 chipset-- well sometimes loads up this kext and it appears like so in the extensions summary of the the system profiler.. which doesnt appear on my other hackintosh lappy, and it seems like EFI is such a big thing, so im just like wondering if this is normal or not.. anyway a screenshot of this.. (lol or am i just making a big deal out of this?)

[Colonel]

Great job guys! I'm really looking forward to 0.3.

[Kiko]

Well after no news for almost a month i guess its time to explain why this project has been very un-eventful.

The maiin reasons we can not advance with EFI are
(1) we dont have a complete environement
(2) We are unable to get a complete environment (unless we get some more talented people to help us make the Intel EFI boards boot to efi shell before it loads the CSM)


So basically we can not move on to loading apple's efi modules properly until we can first get a proper EFi environment to work with and this has nothing to do with apple. It is up to Intel and when it will decide to relase a firmware update which allows us to use the EFI on our boards not justy default us to the CSM

We were able to load boot.efi and watch it begin to load the extensions and kernel, but it crashes due to us having a incomplete environment to work on

[Kiko]

intel source

[McSkywalker]

Kiko, on Oct 18 2006, 09:56 AM, said:

It is up to Intel and when it will decide to relase a firmware update which allows us to use the EFI on our boards

So we have a chance to upgrade the Bios to EFI? I didn't even expect that. How much space does EFI approximately take in the rom chip? Sorry for being ingnorant on that..

[Kiko]

Oh sorry for not explaining it fully, Only Boards made by Intel and those that are 945 and up have EFI so not any BIOS board. But in the near or far future tianocre will release a complete EFI implementation which will allow BIOS users to use EFI (a EFI Emulator)

[McSkywalker]

Thanks for the info I'll keep that in mind for my 865PE.

[munky]

EFI flashroms are usually 4Mb, FYI.

[Vitaliy]

what's missing from our efi environment?
and when boot.efi fails? it will be interesting to add some debug checks to kernel right after first place it uses efi (to determine FSB speed), compile kernel and see what will happen

[McSkywalker]

Thank you Munky, that's the same size as the flash rom chip on my mobo has
If it ever gets to work with EFI...

[Kiko]

mifki, well nothing to do with the kernel or boot.efi yet, mainly its GrpahicsConsole.efi and a couple of other modules which dont seem to be complete

[Vitaliy]

can you give more details please?
you booting into (emulated) efi and what you're trying to do next and where it fails?

[bofors]

Kiko, on Oct 18 2006, 05:56 AM, said:

Well after no news for almost a month i guess its time to explain why this project has been very un-eventful.

The maiin reasons we can not advance with EFI are
(1) we dont have a complete environement
(2) We are unable to get a complete environment (unless we get some more talented people to help us make the Intel EFI boards boot to efi shell before it loads the CSM)
So basically we can not move on to loading apple's efi modules properly until we can first get a proper EFi environment to work with and this has nothing to do with apple. It is up to Intel and when it will decide to relase a firmware update which allows us to use the EFI on our boards not justy default us to the CSM

We were able to load boot.efi and watch it begin to load the extensions and kernel, but it crashes due to us having a incomplete environment to work on

Thanks for the report Kiko.  I would like to try to flush out some of the details by asking a few questions:

(1) Has anyone been able to make the TianoCore tip that Simon found for accessing the native EFI environment?  

(2) Was anyone able to determine which modules are responsible for loading the CSM from loading by dissecting the Intel firmware?

(3) Has any progress been made in learning how to flash custom EFI firmware?

[Kiko]

1) No that is were we are stuck , i dont know much ASm enough to help with the possible solution im learning but my cisco is also taking up a lot of time so i dont have much time to learn  ASm more, that is why we need people to help we have had one or two people starting but then they have disappeared

2) I think i saw  A Legacy BIOS.efi in the list of modules, but the extraction app doesnt extract them all or they are not all included in the intel firmware updates.

3) I think BuildSmart has done this but i have been unable to contact him

[sn8k]

I wonder about a little thing ...

There's a bios replacement made with linux ... can't remember the website of that stuff but ... isn't it possible to make something that could work like this :

POST > Boot To Linux-Bios > Emulating EFi > Boot to OS ???

I think it'll be easier to do instead of remaking the whole part of the EFi ... and it should be more compatible too ...

Well ... i'm not a dev , so, maybe someone can tell if that's possible !

edit : http://linuxbios.org...x.php/Main_Page

[joe75]

The Linux emulator is PPC

[Kiko]

and we have already done that in march lol,

[adriandkicks]

Would it be possible to re-program this to dum the EFI firmware data to a file???

[Kiko]

Well only if we had the source but we might as well do that with the iflash utility supplied by intel, also if you read the other threads w ealreadyhave been able to extract the firmware form intels bios updates.