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Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.
Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.
Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.
It will not be available in the release version of Windows Vista later this year – Microsoft says people will have to wait for an unspecified 'subsequent release of Windows client'. Ritz could not say whether that would be a service pack update to Vista or the next-generation of Windows.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch. Because the Apple Intel Mac platform is entirely new, it does not have any legacy support concerns. It was hoped that 2006 would be the year PC makers would make the switch. Microsoft's lack of Windows support is a huge blow to Intel's hopes, and removes most of the incentive for PC makers to implement it in the short term.
That's terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway.
It said its decision to 'reprioritise' EFI development to the server version of Windows was based on a lack of available desktop PCs with EFI support on the market.
"A combination of factors changed our plans. The big one, in my opinion was platform availability. With this huge move to 64-bit based platforms and for us to support it, we needed to see a large heterogeneous sample of 64 bit implementations out there for us to feel comfortable in supporting it." said Ritz.
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