Support for Windows Vista and higher

[heathercat123]

Hi, I'm currently wondering if Windows Vista/7 could work on the Apple TV using this. Of course, it wouldn't have spectacular performance. except for aero glass, but it would still be an interesting OS to run on such a peculiar device. Freeloader also supports Windows Vista since last year, which will definitely help.

[DistroHopper39B]

Vista is totally possible. Bootvid (kernelspace video driver) doesn't work on Vista last I checked (although it's supposed to - I'll ask around) but my FreeLoader fork is now up to date with ReactOS master. I don't have a binary uploaded yet but I will soon. Genfbvmp (userspace video driver) should work on Vista but might need extra work to not try to use WDDM (don't quote me on that one).

[heathercat123]

Who needs to see the bootscreen and BSODs anyways? Also, now that I think of it, aero glass wouldn't work with the version of the nVidia driver used. It may be worth trying to get newer versions of the driver working. Could the Vista-only 10/31/2006 version work?

[DistroHopper39B]

Who needs to see the bootscreen and BSODs anyways?

Debugging.

Also, now that I think of it, aero glass wouldn't work with the version of the nVidia driver used. It may be worth trying to get newer versions of the driver working. Could the Vista-only 10/31/2006 version work?

It might, I think it’s worth trying to use even newer versions (possibly from 07 or 08) because the first WDDM driver releases are most of what got Vista its reputation of being unstable.

[heathercat123]

For the first one (I'm avoiding quoting chains): I was kidding, those are very important.

For the second: The XP driver which has been proved to not work is from 2010, while the one which works is from 2006. In between the two, there are a bunch of Vista/7-only drivers, so that's good.

[xCuri0]

Maybe modified UefiSeven or update KB5017361 (adds UEFI video support to Windows 7) will make a custom VGA driver not needed ?

Modified Windows loader might not even be necessary, could it just be replaced with something simpler that fixes the environment, loads UEFI disk and other drivers before then loading the Windows bootia32.efi ?

Also it's likely that the 2010 NVIDIA driver could work on Windows 10 too (2009 GMA drivers do) but the performance will probably be terrible even with SSD.

[heathercat123]

Maybe modified UefiSeven or update KB5017361 (adds UEFI video support to Windows 7) will make a custom VGA driver not needed ?

32-bit EFI support was only added in Windows 8. I also believe that the UEFI framebuffer driver is coded directly in boot.efi. If Distro's PE to Mach0 converter is good enough to support BOOTMGR, then it may just work though.

Modified Windows loader might not even be necessary, could it just be replaced with something simpler that fixes the environment, loads UEFI disk and other drivers before then loading the Windows bootia32.efi ?

So using FREELDR to chainload bootia32.efi?

Also it's likely that the 2010 NVIDIA driver could work on Windows 10 too
If the XP version of the 2010 driver doesn't work on XP then you shouldn't have high hopes about the Windows 7 version on Windows 10.

[xCuri0]

I think the second point I mentioned is actually being worked on currently, saw there was an edk2 project for this.

[heathercat123]

That's great! Can't wait to see Windows 10 running at 5 seconds per frame on the Apple TV!

[heathercat123]

I just remembered that Windows 7 never had 32-bit EFI support and Vista only had it in a few betas (build 5219 to 5477), but it was only for UEFI class 2 as far as I know (ATV is class 3). This BetaArchive thread may help for the port, but I believe that it's also only for class 2. A port of UefiSeven may be possible. Another way of doing it would be to port the drivers used for getting Windows XP to work on the Apple TV, though Freeloader doesn't currently support Windows 7.

[xCuri0]

even for Windows XP an INT10H handler like UefiSeven makes things a lot cleaner not having to mess with the drivers, making installation a lot simpler. Probably will fix the NTVDM issue too

[DistroHopper39B]

An INT10H handler is theoretically possible. The NVIDIA GPU also has a standard PC BIOS ROM, it's just in a weird place (see https://web.archive.org/web/20111128060629/http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/atv_blog).

[xCuri0]

For what reason did you go with implementing a UEFI GOP video driver instead of fixing the NVIDIA BIOS ROM location or porting something like UefiSeven ? Because it seems like it made this way harder than it had to be

[heathercat123]

Maybe he just didn't know about the UEFI Class 2 mod for Windows XP, but don't take my word for it.

[DistroHopper39B]

For what reason did you go with implementing a UEFI GOP video driver instead of fixing the NVIDIA BIOS ROM location or porting something like UefiSeven ? Because it seems like it made this way harder than it had to be

Simply copying the ROM to low memory is not enough. I'm not sure how you would actually start up BIOS video using the ROM. From what I can gather I would need some sort of x86 emulator, but I don't understand any of that. It's also never really been done before (the developer of atv-bootloader gave up almost immediately after they started, since Linux has both simplefb and efifb). I used a UEFI driver mostly because one was already in development by some ReactOS developers for use on that operating system (my driver is based on that one with some fixes to allow it to work correctly on Windows).

Maybe he just didn't know about the UEFI Class 2 mod for Windows XP, but don't take my word for it.

If you're referring to the Longhorn loader, that is useless on the Apple TV (along with Quibble, which can also boot XP on class-2) since non-Apple EFI executables will not work on the TV. A firmware mod could get around that, but that would make installation of Windows even more complicated since you'd have to flash the firmware.

[xCuri0]

There are actually ways to bypass the StartImage verification by manually parsing and executing the PE (few examples on GitHub) to load Windows or something like OpenCore but I assume you have tried that and it's not useful because either the UEFI firmware is too outdated to load Windows 8/10 installer (or older versions with UefiSeven/fixed VGA rom and Quibble for XP) or ExitBootServices is already called before loading the kernel.