Windows 10 UEFI Driver Compatibility

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Windows 10 UEFI Driver Compatibility

Bleeding edge and official support questions aside, I have began testing Windows 10 RTM (10240) on an older mid-2010 Macbook Pro, and have come up with the following so far:

Installed Windows 10 using the excellent guide at: The ultimate way to install Windows 8.x in (U)EFI mode on Apple systems
Did not hook Windows up to the internet at install time or immediately after.
Chose to "Defer Upgrades" from Windows Updates control panel.
I manually installed the Keyboard and Trackpad drivers from Boot Camp 5.1.5621.
I moved the Bootcamp.msi file out of the Bootcamp directory and onto my desktop, and installed it from a "Run As Admin" command prompt using the "msiexec /i c:\Users\<INSERT YOUR USERNAME>\Desktop\BootCamp.msi" command.

I now have a "working" Windows 10 installation running under EFI mode on an older Macbook. (This includes Wifi, LAN Port, On-Screen Display, Touchpad (including two-finger and bottom left click right click) volume control, keyboard backlight and backlight brightness control and other basic functionality.

I am testing by creating a Windows restore point between every step.

When a driver or windows driver update goes bad, I get a Windows corn-blue screen of death telling me that Windows is unable to startup, followed by a couple of minutes of Windows Startup Repair, which will ultimately fail. I then have to go to Advanced Troubleshooting and choose the System Restore Point options to get to the last restore point. Occasionally my restore points get corrupted, and I either cannot restore, or I get a "Unable to restore, file system has not been changed" message, however I get back into Windows and the restore point has indeed been rolled back (Thanks M$!)

What is not yet working is the Display drivers, both nVidia and the LCD panel are still on the Generic windows drivers, this also affects screen brightness control.

I have also not tested the ODD (dvd drive) or other features yet.

The reason for posting this is that this forum advises to roll back to Win8 on Bootcamp or ask the Windows forums, and the Windows forum advises to "pack up the macbook in the box it came in, return it to the store and get a proper laptop". Since I don't want to do either of those, I figured I'd see how far I can push Win10 before drivers / updates come from either monolithic corporation to make the process easier.

MacBook Pro, Windows 8, null

Posted on Aug 3, 2015 3:35 AM

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Answer 1

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Loner T

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Aug 3, 2015 4:24 AM in response to MarcS9

You have not yet tested Audio and other esoteric multi-channel Digital Audio. As an experiment, this is fine and dandy. If you need a properly functional Windows/OSX dual-boot, W8.1/Yosemite (or W8.1/Mavericks) is a lot more stable.

I personally dislike fanatic wars about OS X and Windows and the great divide. Both OSes have their strengths and weaknesses.

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Answer 2

MarcS9 Author

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Aug 3, 2015 4:49 AM in response to Loner T

Good points, and I agree with you on all of them.

This definitely is not to be considered *stable* solution, rather as a foundation to point folks in the right direction, as I am seeing tons of posts about Win10, and probably more to come with the auto-"upgrade" feature that Win7 and Win8 will present users.

It's a shame I didn't stick with Maverick, Yosemite's boot time is at least 3 times longer than EFI Win10 on the same hardware (I will get a stop watch going to give accurate times soon). I would like to see Mavericks boot time comparatively as I recall this was way better, but I need at least *one* working OS On this system, so I cannot downgrade right now.

I definitely appreciate all the facets of every OS, if I had a 750Gig drive in this MBP I'd most likely be triple booting into Linux as well, especially as an app dev it makes sense to have as many test environments as possible.

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Answer 3

Loner T

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59,471 points

Aug 3, 2015 4:59 AM in response to MarcS9

Macs after Late 2013 are UEFI-compliant and can support multi-boot across many OSes, including Windows as long as the OSes comply with (U)EFI.

On older Macs with EFI updates for Rowhammer - About the security content of Mac EFI Security Update 2015-001 - Apple Support - it is slower.

I keep my toys and tools separate, otherwise it is hard to find proper tools for the job at hand. 😉

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Answer 4

MarcS9 Author

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Aug 3, 2015 6:57 AM in response to Loner T

I am still not sure I understand the differences between pre and post 2013 macs and the UEFI. If I understand, between 2006 (First Intel Mac) and 2013, they used a proprietary Apple EFI standard, and post-2013 they switched to UEFI?

I got stuck on System Restore post-BootCamp.msi installation, but thanks to this post Some known issues with boot camp 5.1 with windows 10 from gingersome I managed to fix this. (Killing HFS Read support, so I will need to download a third party driver or wait until I don't need restore points anymore)

I then manually installed the Cirrus boot camp driver, and can confirm that I am able to make some pinging noises from MS sound scheme panel as well as a test MP3 via Windows Media player, and checked over earphones that stereo is working. Volume control also separates earphone versus internal speaker volume settings nicely.

When you refer to "multi-channel Digital Audio" what do you mean specifically? Any tests I can perform to check if it is working?

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Answer 5

MarcS9 Author

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Aug 3, 2015 7:16 AM in response to MarcS9

Boot times from Options-held down boot menu till Login screen are:

Yosemite : 1m05s

Windows 10: 0m35s

Windows is clocking in at almost half the time in EFI mode!

Edit: This is on a stock MBP-Mid2010, no SSD just the standard Seagate ST9320325ASG that came with it. I do concede that my Yosemite is a bit more "moved in" however, with a number of apps installed.

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Answer 6

Loner T

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59,471 points

Aug 3, 2015 8:28 AM in response to MarcS9

MarcS9 wrote:

I am still not sure I understand the differences between pre and post 2013 macs and the UEFI. If I understand, between 2006 (First Intel Mac) and 2013, they used a proprietary Apple EFI standard, and post-2013 they switched to UEFI?

UEFI 2.x is an Intel standard which addresses the limitations of the legacy BIOS system and is supported on GPT disks. It has a backward compatibility layer called CSM-BIOS (Compatibility Support Module) BIOS. This allows legacy OS installations on more modern hardware and is slower and has limitations.

Please see https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/vproexpert/blog/2013/08/11 /understanding-amt-uefi-bios-and-secure-boot-relationships for a brief discussion.

Macs prior to Late 2013 have used EFI 1.1. To allow legacy Windows versions to be installed on Macs, Macs use CSM-BIOS to emulate older PCs and BIOS. This layer has no user interface unlike PCs. CSM-BIOS on Macs will hide/expose hardware as necessary at the appropriate lever (firmware/hardware) so device drivers appropriately. For example an integrated GPU with onboard Audio decoding will split the graphics and audio part and expose these as separate devices. If this is broken, GPUs may get exposed, which the OS cannot handle. Intel drivers do not know what to do with an nVidia GPU and vice-a-versa. If Windows does not appropriately handle dual-GPUs, it will crash.

MarcS9 wrote:

When you refer to "multi-channel Digital Audio" what do you mean specifically? Any tests I can perform to check if it is working?

More modern Macs have a combined analog/digital jack which can either output 2-channel Analog Stereo Audio. A mini-TOSLink (S/PDIF) is a digital output from the jack and allows 5.1 Audio channels which can go to an appropriate decoder and allow 5.1 surround sound. Please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK for a description and connector details.

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Answer 7

MarcS9 Author

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Aug 3, 2015 8:48 AM in response to Loner T

Thank you again for your patience and willingness to share, it is greatly appreciated!

I found the below link detailing specifically the architecture and differences between the two versions, it makes sense now that I understand there are two specific versions at play:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/uefi-architecture-and-technical-overvi ew#EFI_1.1_vs._UEFI

I unfortunately do not have any S/PDIF devices to test on, although in Windows 10 Audio panel the "Digital Audio (S/PDIF)" device by Cirrus Logic has a status of "Ready". I also notice several HDMI digital audio devices, presumably accessible via the Displayport, but I have no DP -> HDMI adapter to test this on either, and as such they have a status of "Not plugged in".

I definitely think Display drivers is going to be an issue in this test environment. I have tried the latest nVidia drivers as well as the Bootcamp supplied ones, and whilst I have thankfully not run into the system boot failures as before, neither set of drivers has made any difference to my display capabilities.

The MBP-Mid 2010 does not have a dual-gfx card capability, so switching between discrete and integrated is not a problem for me. The fact that the nVidia drivers install at all, as opposed to giving an error around incorrect hardware, hopefully means that there is some level of hardware support for the display card through the EFI 1.1 interface, but whether this will ever be possible to utilise is another story.

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Answer 8

Mar 11, 2016 10:52 AM in response to MarcS9

Hello,

I installed windows 10 in uefi mode using diskpart and without the bootcamp usb stick. Everything seems smooth except the intel graphics driver keeps crashing the PC if I load it. I was wondering if you ever fixed the display driver issues?

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