As rumored, another favorite Leopard feature did indeed get the axe. Leopard Boot Camp does not offer the “Switch to Windows” option that would quickly allow for switching between Mac OS X and Windows.

The feature appeared on Apple’s web site, and basically worked by taking advantage of each operating system’s hibernation (safe sleep) modes. If you chose “Switch to Windows”, Mac OS X would have gone into Safe Sleep, the system would silently reboot, and Windows would defrost its hibernation state. Similarly, Windows would have an option to “Switch to Mac OS X”.

This was probably one of the best features in Leopard to not make it… Apple took it off the Leopard preview web site shortly after WWDC. Again, bugs appear to be the cause of it getting killed, combined with Apple having trouble configuring it to work with both XP and Vista (which use different hibernation triggers).

The real benefit of this feature was that, unlike Parallels and VMWare, it would allow for near-instant switching between OSes, without denting consuming all available memory. Also, gamers really don’t want the overhead fragging their performance, and would rather boot into Windows natively.

Hopefully Apple will try again with Vista SP1, which is EFI-enabled. Then, they can use EFI calls to automate the hibernation and defrost calls.