Just to provide some brief notes on my quad-booting experience, I will be outlining the OSes installed as well as advantages and problems. I opted for this setup after upgrading my 240GB SSD to a 500GB SSD.
Operating Systems
- Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9)
- Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional
- macOS Sierra (10.12)
- CentOS 7.0
Additional partitions
- Mac OS X Mountain Lion Recovery Mode (10.8)
Copied from my original pre-SSD Apple HDD - CentOS Swap (2GB swap for Linux)
Advantages
- Compatibility
As a Logic Pro 9 user, I still need OS X 10.9 because it’s the last version to properly work with the software. Also living in a business world that uses Windows-based systems, it’s a lot easier to progress when you have Windows readily available. CentOS 7 (RHEL 7 alternative) was chosen as a development environment for me to work on web and software applications that are designed for linux-based systems. - Performance
Using dedicated hardware when you have limited resources tends to remove some of the limitations of virtualisation such as incompatible USB mapping and graphics acceleration. Some software solutions will provide viable virtualisation like Parallels, but they aren’t free. - Simplicity
After the initial installation of operating systems and a boot manager (like rEFInd), you only have to pick which OS you want to use for your computing session. There’s no need to worry about config files and resource allocation as you just use the computer as you normally would.
Problems
With a setup like this it is very common that there will be problems, especially on a MacBook Pro. The problems lie with the alternate operating systems that aren’t officially supported in this kind of configuration.
Microsoft Windows
Since I’m using multiple Macintosh installations and a Linux distribution, I decided to keep the disk in full EFI mode – which created some problems for Microsoft Windows. Windows works in it’s entirety all except for one thing: there’s no audio. This is a known issue with Windows EFI installations on 2011 MacBook Pros and unfortunately there is no complete fix for this (no, updating Intel Graphics drivers and Cirrus audio drivers do not work for every system).
Though I have listed Windows 8.1 Pro as the OS that I successfully installed, I will also note that I experienced the exact same conditions when testing Windows 10 Pro.
Linux
Similarly to Windows, almost everything works but this one has a better chance of fixing. The problem lies with the Broadcom ECM4331 Wi-Fi chip that has no driver installed. This is due to a licensing issue from Broadcom that prevents the distribution of their binary driver. The possible workaround is to compile the driver yourself, however this did not work for me.
macOS Sierra
You might wonder how this popped up here, it’s more of an observation than actual problem. Compared to previous operating systems (10.9 and older), this new OS tends to boot up slightly slower with higher CPU load on the Late 2011 MacBook Pro. This could be a potential business strategy from Apple to force users to purchase a new Mac or move to an iPad — though this is something I’d normally see from the iOS line-up opposed to their computers.
Of course, increasing the CPU load will lead to a temperature increase which will also use more battery. This is not ideal, but at least now I can dual boot.
Workarounds
Microsoft Windows
Use a USB Digital-to-Analogue Converter (DAC) and connect to headphones or speakers.
Linux
Use a USB Wi-Fi dongle that is known to work with your distribution of linux.
Conclusion
This isn’t for everyone, but if you often find yourself in situations where you need dedicated instances of multiple operating systems on a single portable computer, this is for you. If you just want to play around with an application or two in different OSes when your out, you may want to consider virtualisation as this method requires re-partitioning your disk drive.
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