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Blurring The Line Between BIOS And OS
Jon Kincade writes "The Register has an article about Phoenix Technologies cME software that allows users on anything from servers to embedded systems to run diagnostics, browse the web and other things without having to boot into a full fledged OS. The primary use seems to be recovery from system crashes. Also, this may explain why the Phoenix browser was asked to change its name a few months ago."
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Basic Input Output System
If you can do more advance operation through "BIOS", then the "BIOS" is no longer BASIC.
Therefore, it should no longer be called BIOS (Basic IOS)
Call it Embedded Operating System (EmbOS).
Just a thought!
Now that computers aren't coming with floppy drives, there better be something that users can do crash recovery from if the machines won't boot from cd....
Personally I'd like the choice of recovery cds/floppies.
I agree.
The whole point of a "Basic Input/Output System" is for, well, basic I/O. It was meant to be a thin layer between the OS and the hardware.
While I agree that the technology can be improved upon, I don't think this is the proper direction to take.
I much prefer the route that Gigabyte has taken with their DualBIOS. If there is serious enough trouble with the OS, just boot to a CD with recovery tools on it. If there's a problem in the BIOS, you now have a spare. I don't see the necessity of a TCP/IP stack in the BIOS.
My $0.02.
-azmaveth
Precisely, previous posts on this subject lead me to believe Slashdotters have never heard of OpenFirmware or similar. OpenFirmware and OpenBoot are big reasons I stick with G4s and Sun Blades for home use.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
Because we need a standard way to interface with hardware from the OS, and hardware vendors keep adding and improving features (darn them!).
The BIOS is what allows motherboard manufacturers to have different chipsets with different memory, disk, etc, controllers. The BIOS translates basic data requests from the operating system into the specific instructions that each chip requires.
I'm all for open standards on hardware, but the fact is that every time a new feature is introduced or an old feature is upgraded, you need a backwards compatible method of accessing it. Thus the BIOS layer.
My $0.02.
-azmaveth
we used to buy the magazines, go to the stores and log on to the net to be eagerly greeted with hot new tech that made us want to immediately scrap the $10k worth of goodies we'd just bought the week before.
Now it seems that every day brings "innovations" that seem designed to further my intent to hang on to what I've got forever if I can manage it.
What's wrong with this picture?
KFG
When i am doing a fresh install of WIN2K and REDHAT on my comps (a once-in-6-months exercise) i make sure the machine is not even physically hooked up to the net untill i have a software firewall configured, up and running. I keep the firewall packages on CDs, along with config files, and ONLY AFTER these are setup, i go online to install other things, update drivers, etc (usually, only for win2k, not for redhat, which is trivial to bring back to my customized setup)...
;) ...
having TCP/IP built into the bios, with no firewalling support, and no possibility of frequent/safe upating, no easy way to check for "being" owned is a very bad idea. Also, Phoenix being a popular bios manufacturer, there will be a lot of worms targetting this bios tcp/ip stack.
I dont see a single genuine advantage of having all this crap in the BIOS anyway. I mean, if u hose ur drive, and need to go online for some critical information/software before u can bring ur comp back up, just keep a KNOPPIX cd handy. I personally think BIOS shud be thinning down even further, given none of the modern OSes really use most of the services, and the BIOS mostly just gets in their way. All the bios shud be capable of, is to bring up the OS, and then let the OS configure everything. It wud be so neat to have the OS kernel setup all the hardware, the powersaving policies, everything when it starts up. Of course, the best is to just have the OS kernel as the bios!! just throw this anachronism completely out. (yeah for ppl whos fav os is not linux, sumthing else might need to be worked out
Ghoul
Sigura Non Grata
Personally, I'm happy enough just using a bootable disk to fix WinXP (yeah, I know), if it gets hosed. It actually doesn't happen very often anyway. But if for some reason the OS was hosed and using bootable media wasn't an option (perhaps security concerns, for example), how would this be better than just have LILO and a dedicated "repair" partition with linux and a bunch of repair tools on it? This way, as another poster commented, you aren't introducing unneccesary complexity into BIOS. and in fact, this seems very similar to what Phoenix is doing - the ZDNET article mentioned that the bios would have special hard drive partitions with recovery apps at it's disposal. So it seems like the only thing we're doing here is giving BIOS the ability to operate apps on a recovery partition directly, instead of using LILO+linux. Unless your boot record is screwed as well, what's the advantage to this? And if your hard drive is that trashed, doesn't it make more sense to stick the drive in a machine that also has a working HD, copy what you can, and reformat? For that matter, if your hard drive is getting pooched so often that you NEED dedicated bios support, then you should replace it. At least,that's my opinion. IAACTAAHBMMIPS (I Am A Computer Technician As A Hobby But My Major Is Political Science)
I'm the stranger...posting to
Could this be the first version of a 'Auto-Updater' for future Palladium-enabled BIOSes?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
What if they called it an OS on a chip?
Make it separate from the BIOS; but possibly on the same EEPROM chip; it will only load up if you hold down the F12 button (or something) when you boot.
The licenses needed to allow access to chipset specs and APIs are completely incompatible with any kind of open source development. Another issue is that, in order to have a BIOS available soon after the release of a motherboard, you'd have to sign NDAs to get advanced specs and demo hardware. An Open Source project obviously couldn't operate under the terms of an NDA.
I also think it needs to be noted that BIOSes have to be customized for individual motherboards, the part of the BIOS that is specific only to the chipset tends to be provided by the chipset manufacturer anyway.
It's not hard to keep the added complexity out of the boot path. The way I would do this (they never ask me) is to have the brower, etc only launch from a BIOS menu. If you never run it, it's just taking up ROM space, no biggy.
Yes, very bad, because you know if this happens one day you'll see:
Click here to flash your bios.
And you can count the number of seconds on your right hand that will elapse before that link fries your motherboard.
BIOSes are used by old operating systems (DOS, for instance).
And Windows ME, and OS/2, and NetWare -- all still in production.
The PC doesn't need a graphical OS with all that fancy nicknack. The PC needs:
* A serial console! I don't want to connect a VGA monitor to the machine just for tuning the bootdevice
* Get rid of all that INT13 C/H/S booting crap
* The BIOS needs real SCSI support, no more SCSI-BIOS remapping
* Realmode should be dumped completly! When you power on the PC it should be in protected mode immediatly
Everything else like network support is neat, but can be optional.
Just my 2c, Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.