Red Hat to make Linux run on Intel macs

arstechnica ^ | 1/25/2006 9:10:01 AM | Ryan Paul

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future. The current impediment is the Extensible Firmware Interface, a relatively new BIOS replacement designed by Intel that is not yet commonly used or widely supported.

Linux EFI support already exists in the form of elilo, a special version of the LILO bootloader designed specifically for Intel systems that use EFI and the IA64 architecture. The current elilo code base will have to be ported to Intel's x86 architecture before it can be integrated into Linux distributions capable of running on Apple's new systems. Although such a port is theoretically possible, members of the Ars Technica Linux community have pointed out that bootloaders are generally written with plenty of assembly, and consequently are not easily ported. Elilo is not particularly stable and Red Hat representatives have not discussed the methodology they plan to use, so the solution could end up being something else entirely.

Note: These statistics are based on vapid
speculation rather than a real survey.

Red Hat has not yet acquired the relevant hardware, so it may be a while before we see any progress. Community members and Linux enthusiasts may beat Red Hat and get there first, but Red Hat's preliminary commitment shows that commercial Linux distributors are interested in getting a piece of the Apple pie. Since Mac OS X operating system is based in part on BSD, and since running Linux on Apple's new hardware will not provide any unique or compelling advantage over running it on commodity x86 hardware from vendors like Dell and HP (Apple's benchmarks aside, pretty cases do not improve the performance of a laptop's software), some users and developers feel that such porting efforts are unnecessary. There are probably more than a few Mac users out there that also like to dabble in Linux, and there are definitely more than a few Linux users out there that are intruiged by the power and grace of OS X. User demand for Linux on Apple's Intel-based hardware does exist within the dual-boot crowd, but I doubt that anybody wants to run Linux exclusively on their shiny new Macbook.

[ Discuss ]

[jdm]

for the ping list. Thanks.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

So what does MS$ plan to do?

[Senator Bedfellow]

Nice pie chart :)

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me

[N3WBI3]

I suspect Vista will run on the hardware..

[ShadowAce]

Some of you may have already been pinged to this thread via the OSS Ping list.

[cloud8]

What are the advantages of EFI over BIOS?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Not sure....see this:

Extensible Firmware Interface

[ThePythonicCow]

What are the advantages of EFI over BIOS?

It's like the difference between DOS and BIOS. With EFI, you have a general purpose, DOS-like, operating system right in your boot rom. Someone has even ported the python runtime into the EFI environment.

Here's a table I made up, a few years back (June 2000), of the builtin EFI commands.

---

alias [-bdv] [sname] [value]	- Set/get alias settings
attrib [-b] [+/- rhs] [file]	- View/sets file attributes
bcfg -?	- Configures boot driver & load options
cd [path]	- Updates the current directory
cls [background color]	- Clear screen
comp file1 file2	- Compare two files
cp file [file] ... [dest]	- Copy files/dirs
date [mm/dd/yyyy]	- Get or set date
dblk device [Lba] [Blocks]	- Hex dump of BlkIo Devices
dh [-b] [-p prot_id] | [handle]	- Dump handle info
dmpstore	- Dumps variable store
echo [[-on | -off] | [text]	- Echo text to stdout or toggle script echo
edit [file name]	- Edit a file
endfor	- Script-only: Delimiter for loop construct
endif	- Script-only: Delimiter for IF THEN construct
err [level]	- Set or display error level
exit	- exit
for var in	- Script-only: Loop construct
getmtc	- Get next monotonic count
goto label	- Script-only: Jump to label location in script
guid [-b] [sname]	- Dump known guid ids
help [-b] [internal command]	- Displays this help
if [not] condition then	- Script-only: IF THEN construct
_load_defaults	- ???
load driver_name	- Loads a driver
ls [-b] [dir] [dir] ...	- Obtain directory listing
map [-bdvr] [sname[:]] [handle]	- Map shortname to device path
mem [Address] [size] [;MMIO]	- Dump Memory or Memory Mapped IO
memmap [-b]	- Dumps memory map
mkdir dir [dir] ...	- Make directory
mm Address [Width] [;Type]	- Memory Modify: Mem, MMIO, IO, PCI
mode [col row]	- Set/get current text mode
mount BlkDevice [sname[:]]	- Mount a filesytem on a block device
mv sfile dfile	- Moves files
pause	- Script-only: Prompt to quit or continue
pci [bus dev] [func]	- Display PCI device(s) info
reset [/warm] [reset string]	- Cold or Warm reset
rm file/dir [file/dir]	- Remove file/directories
set [-bdv] [sname] [value]	- Set/get environment variable
setsize newsize fname	- sets the files size
stall microseconds	- Delay for x microseconds
time [hh:mm:ss]	- Get or set time
touch [filename]	- View/sets file attributes
type [-a] [-u] [-b] file	- Type file
ver	- Displays version info
vol fs [Volume Label]	- Set or display volume label

---

You get all of the above just running out of the boot rom. You can mount disk file systems, browse them, and make simple changes.

To my mind, Apple did the right thing going out of the gate with EFI instead of BIOS.

This is one of those decisions that you only get to make once, and then live with it for decades. You have to get this one right, up front. EFI is a much more useful boot environment.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another link:

Microsoft related EFI link

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Maybe this says it concisely:

***************************************************

Extensible Firmware Interface

The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is a new type of interface between a computer's firmware, hardware, and the operating system. Computers with the Intel Itanium family of processors use EFI to start and load Windows XP 64-bit Edition (Itanium) and the Itanium-based versions of Windows Server 2003. EFI serves the same purpose for Itanium-based computers as the BIOS found in x86-based computers, but has expanded capabilities that provide:

•	A consistent way to start any compatible operating system.
•	An easy way to add EFI drivers for new bootable devices without the need to update the computer's firmware.

With EFI, an Itanium-based computer can have hard disks with the GUID partition table (GPT) partitioning style and the master boot record (MBR) partitioning style. However, in order for EFI to start and load Windows XP 64-bit Edition (Itanium) or the Itanium-based versions of Windows Server 2003, the operating system must reside on a GPT disk. In a mixed GPT and MBR disk environment, MBR disks are used solely for data storage.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks!

[Bush2000]

Why would anyone want to run Linux on a Mac machine? It's like putting on a cheap suit...

[ThePythonicCow]

The most useful of these commands is "map" - it lists what file systems EFI could find. Then one changes to a file system using a command such as "fs2:", where fs2 is the alias map listed for the filesystem you want to browse further. Rather like DOS "D:", but with multiple letter drive names. Then you can "dir" and "cd" your way around. Each drive alias maintains its own current directory, also like DOS.

There is a build environment for making your own C programs, with a reasonable suite of system calls you can make, of similar use to the command line stuff I listed in the table above. You can run your own commands that you built, off your hard drive.

Red Hat should have no problem getting Linux to boot off one of these Macs. It should be a simple matter of recompiling and dealing with a few minor porting issues the same EFI and elilo (Intel's extended lilo) code that anyone working with Itanium IA64 has been dealing with for years.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I just want to dial in the address of the drive I want to boot from....like we could on the Mainframes....

[ThePythonicCow]

Most folks who want to deal with this will run with an elilo menu coming up, that gives one a list of images/drives to boot from, and (for us nerds) an option to get an EFI Shell prompt. So, usually, booting is either entirely automatic, for the unwashed masses, or a menu like you see in grub or lilo.

If you go to the shell prompt, then it takes at least a couple of commands to boot - one to select the drive (the "fs1:" command, for example) and one to start up your operating system loader (often done by invoking elilo with a command line option to select a prepared paragraph out of the elilo.conf file in that directory).

I never did mainframes, so don't know what it's like to "dial in the address of the boot drive." I went straight from IBM 1130's to DEC PDP 8's and 11's, then to sundry microprocessors.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Couldn't find a picture but did fine this:

In With The Old...

*********************************

Written by special contributor Jeffrey Boulier on 2003-03-12 04:44:01

Some users swear by Aqua interface of MacOS X, others proclaim the desktop-readiness of Linux, the polished presence of Windows XP, or expound upon the stately Solaris as the ultimate operating system. All of these users are wimps.

Back in the old days, programmers toggled in boot code on front-panel switches, submitted jobs through JCL, and counted on a 24 hour operations staff to feed in the tapes for massive 5Mb datasets of accounting information. Portability was a pipe-dream, and computer time was far more valuable than that of the lowly programmer.

Many of these operating systems and their descendents are still around. IBM's phenomenally successful OS/360 is now the 64-bit z/OS, and still provides IBM with billions of dollars in yearly revenue.

[ThePythonicCow]

programmers toggled in boot code on front-panel switches

Oh - you mean this:

DEC PDP-8e

Yes - I've keyed in the operating system, on a front panel just like the one above. And I wrote what I was keying in, in machine code, in 'C', or instruction by instruction, depending.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well, we had dials....can't find a picture though....must be one out there somewhere.