No, the issue is that Apple uses the more modern EFI instead of a BIOS, once that is emulated then OS X boots as long as the hardware is supported.
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If (U)EFI itself was enough, all you'd need would be a motherboard with (U)EFI support - there's already a few of those out there. The
hacky USB device apparently does more than just provide (U)EFI support.
well, physical bloat in the sense of distributions needing many more kernel extensions, much more hardware enumeration and so on. i don't understand the low-down kernel secrets of how OS X enumerates hardware to know if it would be affected much, but I don't want to take risks! :-) My macbook always reliably boots in under 30 seconds and I want it to stay that way.
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Shouldn't really be necessary - you only need slow enumeration for
really old legacy devices. Other than that, you probe the PCI bus for vendor IDs - then you use those to load appropriate drivers. So it's not like you need to "test for a zillion devices that might not be present", you more or less simply use PCI vendors IDs to index a "database" of drivers.
You can run vanilla *or* custom kernels fine on any hardware IIUC (at least I ran both custom and vanilla kernels fine on my Dellintosh once EFI was emulated). I'm not sure which bits are AES encrypted, but the kernel itself is open-source and thus easly modified (which is what the hackintosh hackers do, download source from Apple and compile). Apple could be much more obstructive than they are, and if anything largely ignore the hackintosh community IMO. The Psystar case may change all that sadly.
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Hm, you say "Dellintosh" - that would imply either using one of those
pira... gray-zone torrents or manually modified installs, wouldn't it? I should go link-hunting for the info on the AES encryption and other weirdness being done in OS X. But from my memory of it, it seems like Apple has released only the bare minimum they need to in order to comply with the licenses from the projects they're using source from,
not because they want to be
open.
EDIT: I found
the stuff I was thinking of - unfortunately, it's part of a book, so only part of it is online (hm, I think I read a longer part of it - either I remember wrong, or it was turned to book and snipped down later on). Anyway, it implies that certain apple
applications are encrypted, and protected by kernel-mode code that does decryption. And from what I remember, the decryption key isn't located in the public available source code, and apple are jumping through hoops to try to make you unable to dump the decryption keys from memory... thus the little poem you get when you try to:
Your karma check for today: There once was was a user that whined his existing OS was so blind, he'd do better to pirate an OS that ran great but found his hardware declined. Please don't steal Mac OS! Really, that's way uncool. (C) Apple Computer, Inc.U??VWS?5P
.
Yeah, apple is open alright
