Well sorry about the downtime and the disappearance of the forum, We now have our forum back, and dont be worried about not being able to see any threads or topics, i have moved them all to the Archive Sub-Forum. This was mainly done, because i wanted a clean slate, for what will hopefully be a year of heavy testing and feedback. Stay tuned for more info's .

P.S: Thre might be, as always a long time of in-activity on these forums, this can be contributed to many things, i.e: Work, But unless stated, work will still be continuing on EFI, So no PM's asking if we are still active, because we are unless stated.

Enjoy !!!

w00t!

good news!

real good news

great!

Looking forward to hearing good news from you. I this project becomes fruitful soon.

I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together.

A quick look at where the posters in this thread are from, and I realize no one will get that reference. Incredible global appeal. Best of luck, we're all excited about the project.

Great! From this project I have the greatest expectations.

hello, i have laptop with InsydeH2O bios on it (as i figure out it's EFI bios) i am trying to disassemble that bios and add some changes on it, i read a lot of literature about on board chipset's, efi specifications, now i can extract PE32 executables, i could help you guys.

sorry for my english, i am not native english speaker but i am understanding everything very well.

Thats great news, we can talk more if you come onto our IRC channel on, irc.macspeak.net and join #MacEfi. Also when u extract the binaries, did u extract them from the actual bios file?

at last ! with help of that great xfv application i extracted whole firmware ! now i got all efi files .. i got everything thank you all

Hi all,

BTW, I am a firmware engineer, worked on ARM platforms with Presice MQX RTOS. Never done BIOS or EFI work though. I have a gateway CX2724 (or Model No TA6), it has an intel 945GM chipset which from what I read so far should support EFI. The BIOS (if emulated) seems to be a PhoenixBIOS. Tried to connect to irc.macspeak.net#MacEfi, got "#MacEfi can't join channel (need correct key)". I am a total newb with IRC. I read and read elswhere and am still not sure where to start.

Just for fun, I'd really like to fool around with my mobo and make it look like a intel Mac... Could anyone post a rundown of where the community is on this, where to start (tools and brief explanations) and where to exchange? BTW, unless there is a constant vigile of an IRC channel by experts, it would be nice to have forums topics which somewhat documents where things are, my 2 cents...

Thanks!

Vecchio, just join #sake on irc.moofspeak.net, and ask me (Kiko) or nVidia_user to let u in.

Good News!

I just bought a very limited Intel motherboard, MicroATX even though its going into an ATX case, because I think MacEFIx86 will succeed. Keep at it

All that is missing now is:

An Apple like EFI enviroment (to actually give the kernel everything it suspects is there and let boot.efi continue)



All I was figuring (as I dont have a real mac here) HOW does the real Apple firmware look like? I mean what is its sturcture?

PEI
|
\/
DXE
|
\/
=-HFSplus.efi?
+-driver modules?
+-boot.efi?


What is the directory structure etc etc? I still dont know those and I know that there must be a certain file called at bootup to chain the rest of events (AppleEvent.efi?) Or are the file GUID's in the "right order" if so its strange there is no directory structure...

Kiko or someone else could you PM/mail or just msg here what the firmware "specs" are how it looks like and maybe what is required for a successful boot sequence to start boot.efi. The main thing im worried about now is that we might be able to LOAD the .fd firmware if we extract it to a .fv file OR is it the same? (someone tried the loadfv.efi? As I know it loads EFIEXTENDED.fv on the DUET drive and contains ALL drivers for fat, usbm etc etc)

So we might be able to try this to either load or convert a .fd file to load the "pre" firmware?

Or im floating off into the dark ... I also might need some extra food now and I need to go get some new weed as I just ran out after forking with EFI for 2 straight days



Also I want to try if its possible to handle the TPM by EFI driver. Then my next concern was using the DUET implementation does a native EFI implementation onboard stay active? As in OS calls to EFI framework > EFI framework loads corresponding modules?


but first I goto city get myself some weed, go sleep and reread what I just wrote lolololol

extarct the LOCKED_MPB11.fd or whatever its called, use those files, you need hfsplus.efi to see hfs volumes, and boot.efi. boot.efi may have other dependenices, we do not know

the .fd file from apple consists of more "volumes"

the .fd file is nothing more than a "firmware device"-file, its madeup by glueing two or more binary files together.
or on the msdos promp simply copy /b <file 1> + /b <file 2> /b <output-file>

I know now that PEI is loaded from the first part then it searches for and jumps to the actual firmware (aka EFI drivers or dxe), what are the other two?

Also I bumped into the problem my own PC at home is an AMD64 ... seems to crash efildr right after bootmenu shows
Both IA32 (efi and uefi) and X64 builds do this, have yet to find out why.

And I got this pile of files from which I have to recover names, anyone here has a GUID > name list for the firmware's?

Interresting code

#define EFI_FIRMWARE_BASE_ADDRESS 0x00200000

interesting..
by intel spec. tee base address of firmware should be near 4gb (0xFF800000),
but 0xFFFFFFFF-0xFF800000=0x0020000

Netkas did a great job on this. Meaybe we can help?

http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1092

current status

using tianocore shell on usb stick
added hfsplus.efi module there, to be able to read hfs+ partitions
patched boot.efi works fine
kernel load and runs
the only problems - graphics.
pc bootloader pass to kernel data about current video card settings (resolution , depth, base memory adress, etc) and also pc bootloader sets vesa mode before running kernel
i ripped values for vga 80x24 mode and vesa 1024x768 mode
the only problem - to set vesa mode somewhere

kernel boots fine, it's modified to utilize efi
even boots to gui, but callisto sets too bad mode for monitor, so i can't see anything, but i can get a screenshot, and sounds, so gui works fine

the only problem right now - some efi tool, which will set vesa mode on videocard, Or, adding this staff to kernel...all needed info about setting vesa mode can be found in boot-132 sources, from apple. file graphics.c. any help is good.

I've already seen that, we had that working sometime last year, but we never had a UGA (vesa driver for the video card). If netkas comes on to irc again soon, i'll talk with him as i might have a solution for him. Also, the aim of this is to be able to use a un-modified kernel, the kernel which boots has crc checks taken out, so not un-modified.

Also on one of our test beds we had efi booting off a cd straight to the GUI with full res change

From netkas:

ok. here is all stuff i used
http://tinyurl.com/2nvwnd
readme inside

ATTENTION, not for noob, only for skilled.
for that you need usb stick.

hey , don't recopy my posts!!
it's weird, if you want to provide info - paste link to source!!

Nobody seen the current efi effort results from Netkas? He got OSX booting to the desktop and full working using the efi.
http://netkas.freeflux.net/blog/archive/20.../efi-pwned.html

from what I understand, netkas's solution still requires a custom-compiled kernel and therefore really doesn't take us any further than where we are today. The whole point of using EFI is to be able to boot the stock apple kernel, system etc, from an EFI-enabled PC..

just afaik... there isn't much info around on this development.

I just wished we could get rid of the lonewolfiness, and cooperate with the findings.

and btw if anyone have the time or resources to add anything more to this it would be cool:

http://efi.openmacos.com/wiki

I should be getting a P35 chipset mobo (Asus p5k) so I will be able to run some tests if you need to see if intel has happened to add anything cool in its new chipset/ich9.

My reasons were to get it working on pc with efi, it was experiment, not for mainstream using, just to collect knowledgments for later use.

I'm glad that the work is showing results. IIRC, with EFI working, certain video drivers will work without modification? I'll be very much impressed if the stock kernel won't need patching sometime, but booting with EFI is a step forward.

Netkas' page says something about a "Kiko" "stealing" some OS X patch. That "lonewolfness" really is annoying. No need to explain anything here and derail a topic, I don't need to know that stuff, it's just a good example of someone wanting to "go it alone" and not share new developments.

don't start stupid war again...

Of course not. I know nothing about it other than the post I saw on the netkas page. I'm simply interested in EFI progress. What benefits does the current progress bring?

none, its actually more trouble imo

it's not possible simply because there are cpu checks in kernel and efi can't help us here, so patches will be needed in any case

Hmm, not if you have core 2's and vt-x

Hey Kiko!

Nice to see you keeping this afloat.

Seems like after reading over everything you guys ended up duplicating the results I had where the graphics would crash it out. Are you still stalled out on that? I don't have my dev environment setup anymore.. but if I get some time I might see if I can get set back up and let you know since I'm not working on anything else OSx86 related atm.

I'll let you know hopefully soon.

Hey rogabean, yeah, that'd be great. just been really busy trying to get my life together lately

Well it looks like the best results have been gotten from DUET.. unfortunately I'm a machine now that doesn't work with DUET so I'm going to have to rectify that.

ok, so under Netkas' blog he says that he is off the x86 efi for sometime thanks to "chmoski" and he's switching to iphone?
http://netkas.freeflux.net/blog/

??

netkas hasnt worked on efi since may iirc, none of us have really done any work surrounding efi lately as the only valid/viable option would be to flash boards. which none of us have the tools to do

oh wow! good to know! thanks Kiko

Does this mean that we will never have a BootCamp option? And that we allways have to patch a kernel , APLESMIBIOS, & or others kext to have working system?

Wow that sucks man....

Well, if you dont like it. Buy a mac. Not until motherboard vendors such as Intel and asus start to allow UEFI booting, then we will/should be able to get bootcamp, etc etc

I thought that there were intel boards efi based already :S

Yes, but Intel hasn't allowed, or it hasn't been discovered how to boot EFI on these boards.

So Netkas is going to give a new kernel of leopard, or osx86 project stops here.
Good, i miss Maxxuss. He was King.

netkas and all others will work on all, when leopard final is released
so take your time

&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I am less concerned about using a stock a kernel then being able to take advantage of firmware functionality like BootCamp and BootSelector and TargetDisk Mode.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The original reason I was interested in EFI was to enable the use of Apple graphics drivers and with Natit and such that is no longer an issue.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What exactly has netkas accomplished on the EFI front, this is not clear to me:

how can one use a stock kernel withouth EFI ?
As i know many kext and kernel communicate with EFI info
So we need an Emulator Right ?

One cannot use the stock kernel without EFI, and probably some apple boot software (boot.efi or something?). An emulator could work, by booting in BIOS and then into an EFI environment, or there needs to be a way to boot the motherboard into EFI.

The only way to get proper and full OS X support on PC hardware, is to have EFI working. It's why I truly hope that efforts will continue on MacEFIx86.