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A Web Browser in Your BIOS?
Anonymous Coward points to this article on xbitlabs.com, which begins "At the recently held Computex show in Taipei Phoenix Technology Company introduced its new FirstBIOS based on Linux. Among the major advantages of this product, they mentioned such things as PC wake from different standby modes and integrated means of rapid PC recovery in case of failure." That's not all, though -- the article goes on to say that "the most remarkable thing is that you will be able to get access to Internet directly from this interface either via the traditional modem or local network. In this case the data will be stored in NTFS, FAT32 and ext2 file systems.
According to Phoenix, all these features fit into 16Mbit Flash memory."
The article is pretty basic, it doesn't say web browser, it just says internet access.
I think it is probaly a bit of bloat, but it would be nice to flash your bios, or maybe download drivers without using the OS at all.
Start the computer into BIOS mode, it dials in, grabs the new image or whatever you need, and can install it. Could also be nice to get recovery tools for your broken OS install.
A mini-OS on a chip, where have I seen that before? (Amiga Kickstart?)
While the modularity and flexibility of certain OSes make for lovely exhibits of creativity, this makes me wonder.
The article mentioned Java and Flash abilities, also. Can you imagine a remote root exploit in your Internet-connected BIOS?
How about a nice Flash/Java app that embeds SMTP commands to turn your BIOS into a high-speed spam machine?
My crystal ball shows an ever-brightening future for Internet security consultants.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They mention that data can be stored in NTFS...has the linux ntfs driver write support progressed beyond "extremely dangerous"?
..
nice feature but i didnt think the drivers were there yet
It does seem more like a gimic than anything that would be useful in day to day operation. I can see one use though. More than once I've be installing an OS (Microsoft - what do you want to reinstall today) and suddenly found that I needed information on a hard drive, or an updated driver, or some other information that I wanted to get from the web. In my case I fire up the old P166 and reslove things with it, but the ability to get to the web while resolving problems could be handy for many.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There are plenty of advantages and drawbacks to something like this.
I like the quick power on and no need for long bootup wait and the potential for diskless operation. Ideal for consumer electronic applications like PVRs.
As others have mentioned, the complexity of the BIOS now means it's harder to secure against network exploits. How about reducing the network functionality down to a minimum? BUt, at the same time, it would be nice to have standard network functionality to replace all these different internal communication busses.
Imagine if the HD were communicating via IP to other internal components. It would be interesting if my PC were nothing but a mini LAn of components that could be just more networked devices. And if I could make a NAS down the hall look really local and not through SMB or NFS.
The networking built into the X windowing system would be small potatotes compared to having everything be a networked device: video card, mouse, keyboard, harddisk, CD, etc. This new BIOS seems like an important step if something like that is ever to happen.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yeah , useful for everyone until a hole is found in the TCP stack in ROM and you either have to
flash a new image or even worse have to physically
change the chip.
Except that most big-name server vendors utiliy partitions are a proprietary nightmare that often cause more problems than they are worth.
If you don't believe me buy a new computer fdisk the hard drive remove all partitions completely reformat drive with no Vendor junk on it and then see how much faster your computer runs.
Of course that is not entirely caused by the utility partition, but it still causes other problems... Especially if you need to copy drive, etc.
Is it just me or is this just really pointless? I don't see any real reason why a BIOS would do any good with this feature. There are some neat BIOS utilities like MSI's LiveBIOS and FuzzyLogic that maintains and upgrades the BIOS over the net from the OS- though it sounds like a useful tool, I wouldn't touch with a 150 mile pole just yet and I still prefer the old fashioned boot from floppy and flash the bios image off the HDD. I think the LinuxBIOS is a cool project, hopefully it can become of some use, I have a busted Slot1 mobo with a bad BIOS that needs an EEPROM burn, I'd like to see if I can get LinuxBIOS on it one day.
It appears that they are targetting information appliances and other "embedded" uses for computers. I see this as being the first mainstream use of making the "dumb box" alot smarter.
;)
I'm already running a network-aware Linux box off of a floppy (no HD), have Linux on my PDA, and Linux on 3 IOpeners, among other places. With something like aptget (or whatever that network installation feature of Debian is called) one could have a bootable machine and have it dynamically get "features" on demain.
The BIOS is already flashable today so it looks like tomorrow we'll have a much smarter box BEFORE that proprietary OS from Redmond gets booted.
Something like this could open the publics eyes as to how small and powerful Linux can be. Where do YOU want to go TOMORROW?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Haven't any of you seen the QNX demo floppy: Kernel, GUI, Graphical Webbrowser, Java VM, and Network or Modem drivers all on a floppy. QNX can also run on BIOSless machines I'm pretty sure, and can easily run from flash memory. So, what's the big deal with someone putting this stuff into a web-appliance machine when it's already been done?
--I think it's a slick idea. What would be cool would be a 99$ internet surfing machine, all the OS and webrowser, etc contained on a chip, have some industry standard CHEAP ram like pc 133 ram, connected to a cheap lcd screen. Sort of a barebones laptop, ready to rock out the door.
Believe it or nutz, there are MILLIONS of people who just want to surf web pages and do email, they could care less about home networks and running the latest 4 dimensional childish video gore games, etc, and for them, a really cheap and functional machine like that would sell like hotcakes. Sort of an advanced webtv dealie, but zip moving parts, no floppy or cd drive, no hard drive, all solid state. Plug it in with an adapter so it's either 12 volt car-ish or 110, and the phone line. Done. Perhaps based on something really secure like a hardened linux or bsd OS. And ya, if it screws up or gets owned, a replaceable snap in chip to "fix" it, again, a mass produced chip.
They seem to be going along fine and that's probably where this 'firstbios' originated.
Check them out, they can boot your machine so fast your HD's don't have time to spin up.
Liberty.
While this Linux in the BIOS thing is good for embedded systems, I still think there should be Open Firmware in an Intel PC. Think of it, the ability to load ELF files directly from the firmware...
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