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.

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.