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The Death of DOS and BIOS Updates?
Mike Hicks asks: "The release of Windows XP was heralded by Microsoft as the Death of DOS. No longer is everything riding on command.com and friends. However, most BIOS update utilities -- whether for motherboards or DVD drives -- are still written to work under DOS. Certainly, a lot of DOS boot diskettes are squirreled away all over the place, but they are going to disappear over time. What will we be using in the next few years to update firmware? Do adequate non-DOS solutions exist now?" I would hope that maybe BIOS updates would then be distributed as disk images that would boot you right into the update utility, however more than likely there will be a Windows XP utility to do this. Here's hoping, however, that an OS-neutral solution presents itself in the future.
Of course, there is still FreeDOS. If I were distributing a BIOS upgrade, I would distribute a bootable disk image using FreeDOS. Then there are no licensing issues to work out with Microsoft, and you don't have to worry about what OS people are running.
Oh, and don't forget about OpenDOS, the now-free version of Dr-DOS.
I don't think that it's likely that the updater will ever run under windows. If that happened you couldn't flash your BIOS to solve problems that prevented Windows from booting fully. If anything changes with current BIOSs it would likly be a move to standalone updaters on a bootable disk. Also, Intel has plans to replace the stnadard PC bios with EFI which is already used on IA-64 and is available for IA-32 vendors. The EFI 'bios' has a shell, and can self update. Now that there is no DOS, perhaps the dependance on BIOS calls will go away, and systems can start using this far superior system.
Actually, when you format a disk using WindowsXP's explorer, it gives you the option to make a DOS Boot Disk. I've tried this a couple of days ago to update my SCSI firmware, and it works great.