[geeks] The EFIX dongle

[Jonathan Groll]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:55:48AM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:
>Recent news announcements seem to indicate the imminent release of the
>EFIX dongle. It apparently is a USB dongle that allows the
>installation of OS X from retail media onto non-Apple hardware:
>
>http://forum.efi-x.com/
>
>How would such a dongle work on a technical level? There is much
>debate here in the office, but none of us really know much about
>EFI. Does this have to be implemented as hardware, and how would it
>work on a PC with a regular BIOS?

To answer some of my own post, one of the commentors on osnews had
this to say:

"Its a bootable device (there's some BIOS firmware issue requiring it
to be on the internal 11pin connector to be fully bootable i believe,
not sure on specifics).

the device contains a boot loader and a boot menu. this booter is not
running any apple or OSX code, all it does is allows you to then boot
off a legit OSX DVD installer or OSX drive.

the USB dongle also has some code to then pre-load some kernel
extensions that can disable known 'bad' extensions that cause kernel
panics on non-apple hardware (AppleIntelCPUManager.kext, etc) and
others that can inject EFI data so that the drivers can properly load
(Network, Video etc).

I believe the only fishy thing that might be going on is the EFI-X
device having a kext that can decrypt some of the apple binaries to
run (dsmost.kext or appledecrypt.kext)."

See http://www.osnews.com/comments/20299 for the original post.

Cheers,
Jonathan