Macintosh with Boot Camp

Macintosh with Boot Camp

<unknown.gif>by brian on Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:55 pm

We have seen a number of issues when using Boot Camp on Mac hardware.

KbdMgr.exe BSOD's

High DPC latencies

Hotfixes from Microsoft should be installed

Incompatibilities with the LSI chipset.

Boot Camp Manager (KbdMgr.exe)

This utility is installed by the Boot Camp driver installer. By

default it loads as a process when Windows is booted.

There are several known issues with this process, one of which is a

conflict with other drivers which use scatter-gather DMA, such as

1394 drivers including the Windows Dice Driver.

In some cases this can cause BSOD's.

For this reason and others (see below), for users of Boot Camp

2.0.2.x we recommend that users disable the KbdMgr.exe process when

using DiceDriver withBoot Camp Intel Mac's.

This can be done using the startup tab in the msconfig utility.

WindowsXP users choose Start->Run and enter 'msconfig', Windows

Vista users type 'msconfig' in the Start menu search box or Start-

run depending on which view is configured.

DPC

The boot camp drivers and utilities introduce extreme DPC

latencies, specifically the Keyboard Manager (kbdmgr process) and

the WiFi drivers.

When using time-sensitive software and drivers such as with audio

recording, stop the kbdmgr process and disable the WiFi adapter.

Hotfix

Macintosh computers often have an S800 1394B FireWire interface,

and the Microsoft drivers do not handle this correctly without

installing a hotfix (SP2) or making a registry change (SP3). The

result without this is that the driver always uses the interface at

the S100 speed, which is not adequate for high channel-count audio

applications.

Windows XP SP2:

- Install the hotfix mentioned in the linked article below. If you

add another OHCI card later you must either re-run the hotfix or

manually fix the SidSpeed field for the new adapter. The first time

you run the hot-fix it will actually update the drivers as well,

which fixes other problems.

XP SP3:

- The SP2 hotfix will not run on SP3, and actually on SP3 the OHCI

drivers are fine. You do however still need to add the SidSpeed

manually if you are using an OHCI card based on a 1394b chip. The

article below explains where to add the registry entry.

See this article for details:

Incompatibilities

Some Apple computers, particularly the new MacBook Pro (from the

2nd half of 2008) include an LSI (Agere) chipset which is not

compatible with our drivers:

Currently, the only workaround is to use an ExpressCard not based

on the LSI chip set. Like this one (

... t-ecFW.htm)

We are currently working with LSI and Microsoft to solve this

problem.

Note that our drivers work fine when running OS X on these computers.