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How Good is Commercial BIOS Code?
Bitten-by-BIOSbugs asks: "My job involves porting PC BIOS code supplied by one of the Big Names to my employer's products. In my experience, this code seems to be so full of holes you could strain pasta with it. However, the vendor seems not to care when I report bugs, and rarely have fixes been made available. What is the experience of other Slashdot readers regarding the quality of commercial BIOS products?"
Judging from my experience with some of the more esoteric functions of mainboard BIOSes, namely booting various operating systems from network, cd and usb, BIOS vendors (and a good deal of bootloader-coders as well) are doing only the bare minimum to get the OS up and running in standard configurations (OS on IDE harddisk, drivers are loaded before other devices are accessed). Deviate from that path and it's a minefield of crashes and instabilities. In a BIOS source, I would expect mostly tables of configuration data and patchy, ugly code.
I dunno about commercial BIOS code, but the BIOS I use is pretty good... and I can verify it for myself if I want to. :-)
The reason why is that they've been working with assembly language for most of their careers, while everyone else was learning advanced techniques like object-oriented design and development, and working on multiple languages (C++, Java, C#, etc). There were a dozen BIOS developers in my department, and I was the only one who lnew object-oriented programming. The only one!
Now, you might be saying, what does OO have to do with BIOS? True, you're not supposed to write OO assembly code, but you are at least supposed to understand the concept, so that you can apply them in some way. The Linux kernel is written like this - the kernel developers know OO concepts, but they use them only where necessary, and the code is still written in C.
I firmly believe that the only reason why these people worked there was because no one could write this code. Writing BIOS is hard, and it's almost impossible to find someone who knows BIOS and modern programming techniques. I remember this one guy who consumed caffeine all day long and was completely wired. He wrote code really fast, but it was all very poorly designed, and none of it was documented. Every time a new feature was added, the guy had to hack it in somehow, because the original code was always written to just what it was supposed to do, no more.
Another reason why they were so bad is that BIOS developers are highly resistant to change. Most of them spend all their time updating the code to support new motherboards, but they would never rewrite anything to improve its design. The majority of code was written back in the 80's, and no one wants to touch it. So this code just sits there, from one version to the next.
What made it more pathetic was that these people were actually better than most BIOS programmers. We would have conference calls with some of these other developers (the company doesn't write the BIOS for all motherboards they sell), and we would ask them technical questions, and they couldn't answer half of them!
The real solution is to rewrite the entire BIOS from scratch, using proper OO techniques, and writing as much code as possible in C. But today's BIOS programmers aren't qualified for that job.
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