14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat Representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week the company's plan to add support for the new Intel Macs. Several other Linux distributions such as Fedora already support the PowerPC architecture that was used by Apple, and Red Hat wants to make sure that its software will work on the new Apple hardware.
The problem at hand is Extensible Firmware Interface, the BIOS replacement designed by Intel, which incidentally is also the major obstacle that prevents the use of currently available versions of Windows. Linux EFI support currently can be found in the form of elilo, a special version of the LILO bootloader, which has been designed especially for Intel systems that use EFI and the IA64 architecture. The elilo code will have to be ported to Intel's x86 architecture in order for it to be integrated into Linux distributions capable of running on Apple's new hardware. Although such a port is possible in theory, such bootloaders are in general written with plenty of assembly and are by no means easy to port. Furthermore, elilo is not renowned for stability.
At the moment, Red Hat representatives have not gone into detail about the methods they are planning to employ, so it might have nothing whatsoever to do with elilo.