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?"

Comments

It's a dying concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Since so few BIOS functions are actually used once the operating system gets into place, it's becoming less and less of a concern to get things perfect. Unless it causes the computer to explode, fixing a bug doesn't get them any more customers so companies don't bother.

Too many are broken

[SpaceLifeForm]

IMO, too many BIOSes are incomplete or are mis-implemented. Most seem to only implement the bare minimum needed for a given motherboard/chipset.

Re:I Think.

[Anonymous Coward]

APM routines, boot code, and basic chipset managment are the only thing that bios should be doing imo. These should be standardized so that I could hack out an OS with suspend featues on most motherboards in less than the current impossibilty.

Re:I Think.

[innocent_white_lamb]

You're forgetting about embedded applications using "sort-of-standard" hardware. The more you can pack in to the smaller space, the better in those situations. So if a bios provides "service X" then why should you be expected to write "service X" all over again just so you can have two copies in your romset and occupy more space.

Re:Who needs commercial code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worhy cause, but too bad it only supports a few motherboards that nobody outside of third-world countries, and of course China, where everyone dumps all their shit, can find.

It also has about two lines of actual documentation on how to set it up, giving anyone who wants to use it a funny look on their face and a need to go look on the poorly archived mailing list for an answer that isn't there. Then the mailing list is sparsely updated with material like, "Hey! Now Linux Bios works on yet another board over a year old that you can't even find on Ebay!", or "Ooh, another company expressed interest in using it, but this has no actual relevance to whether or not you can use it on your computer. Because you still can't."

If you think this is trolling, you obviously have never tried to use Linux Bios. It is a great idea, and I wish it worked, but it doesn't except in .00000001% of cases where you can find the exact same hardware one of the programmers has. If the developers wanted for it to succeed they would set up a better development cycle and beg (or prominently show strong requests, whatever) for hardware to get working or something.

Re:Are there still BIOSs in new PCs?

[amorsen]

Is it time for the BIOS to go the way of the BASIC interpreter provided in the original PC ROMS?

The trend is in the opposite direction. Things like ACPI have made the BIOS code vastly larger and more complex. This is especially troubling for Linux, since the testing of a BIOS seems to be "Does it boot Windows?" "Most of the time" "Ship it!". Other vendors have taken to putting switches in the BIOS setup where the users pick a BIOS that is suited for the particular OS they intend to use.

There has been long debates on the linux-kernel list of whether ACPI should be used by Linux. Using it the way it was intended means calling into BIOS code quite often. Since it seems no vendor has managed to produce an ACPI-implementation that is both reasonably bug-free and reasonably complete, there are worries stability and security. Imagine a backdoor in an ACPI BIOS... The shipping Linux kernel uses ACPI as little as possible, but it is not clear that it can be avoided forever.

The only thing about the BIOS that might go away is the name. It isn't really basic or about I/O anymore.