9/1/2023 0 Comments FlashbootIn addition to patching the loader, FlashBoot Pro provides a set of prepackages drivers for USB 3.x, NVMe and AHCI RAID controllers, which can be integrated to Windows 7 Setup just by a few checkboxes ticked on (driver integration is hardly a suprise for a seasoned Windows 7 installers from this forum, and was meant to simplify this matter for beginners). `Windows 7 圆4 preloader to provide VGA emulation on the pure UEFI systems' has become a feature of our software product (FlashBoot Pro). Black sidebars remain at boot time only, when animated OS logo is displayed by Windows 7 via standard VGA driver. But after installation of the native GPU drivers (from Intel, AMD or NVIDIA) everything goes back to normal. The only drawback of this approach is that screen resolution is fixed at 1024x768 with black sidebars added as necessary to fill in for the native resolution of the LCD screen. Last but not least: Windows 7 BSoD works as expected! Safe Mode and Windows Recovery work as expected. It's no longer necessary to set "novesa on" option via bcdedit. Thus, it is no longer necessary to disable Vga and VgaSave services in registry. This patch is activated every time Windows boots, so NTOSKRNL.EXE is updated on the fly, only in the RAM, and on-disk version of this file is not affected (it may undergo any Windows 7 updates, it may be contained inside BOOT.WIM etc).įinal result of our efforts: Windows 7 圆4 with preloader boots fine on pure UEFI systems (without CSM and without properly mapped VGA I/O ports): we successfully tested it and confirmed to work on ASUS C8HM70-I, Dell Inspiron 3584, HP OMEN X 17-ap001ur, Atomic Pi, "bhyve" virtual machine with VGA emulation disabled, "VirtualBox" virtual machine configured in UEFI mode for Windows 8 guest OS. Therefore, we continued development of our preloader for Windows 7 by introducing a patch for NTOSKRNL.EXE to replace all instances of direct I/O via VGA ports with updates of framebuffer provided by UEFI GOP (in similar manner to Windows 8+). Also, Windows 7 OS kernel has several other functions, such as VidInitialize(), VgaInterpretCmdStream(), VidSolidColorFill(), SetPixel() etc, which perform direct I/O on VGA ports for drawing BSoD (blue screen of death). First of all, Windows 7 OS kernel has VgaIsPresent() function which may halt boot process indefinitely on the "glowing logo" phase if VGA-compatible GPU does not respond on the standard I/O ports (0x3C0-0x3DF). In addition to invoking VGA BIOS via INT 10H in VIDEOPRT.SYS, Windows 7 makes direct reads and writes to/from VGA I/O ports right from the OS kernel (NTOSKRNL.EXE). So, will it be enough to provide a custom INT 10H handler (by implementing a specialized UEFI preloader) to boot Windows 7 successfully on the modern pure UEFI systems? This custom INT 10H handler can rely on UEFI GOP to provide some sort of "mini CSM" (not a real thing, but just enough for VIDEOPRT.SYS to boot Windows 7).Īs our experiments demonstrated, this, unfortunately, is not enough. Starting from Windows 8, everything has changed: INT 10H handler is no longer required by Windows to boot, BIOS emulator and entire VGA miniport driver both are gone, instead Windows basic display driver relies upon UEFI Graphics Output Protocol aka GOP. By the way, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2 never directly run the INT 10H handler installed by BIOS/CSM, instead they contain an emulator in the VGA miniport driver (VIDEOPRT.SYS) which runs 16-bit BIOS code in a sandbox, without leaving 64-bit protected mode and without halting other CPU cores. What is really important for Windows 7 is a VGA-compatible GPU with properly mapped I/O ports and INT 10H handler (the former depends mostly on the chipset and the latter is usually provided by firmware when CSM mode is enabled in the settings). For example, "bhyve" virtual machine manager in FreeBSD supports 64-bit editions of Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2, despite the complete lack of CSM support. It's a well-known fact that Windows 7 works best in CSM mode, which, unfortunately, is not supported by the firmware of many modern motherboards and laptops.Ĭontrary to popular belief, it's possible to install Windows 7 圆4 to the pure UEFI systems without CSM support.
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