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."

Comments

Why do we even have a BIOS anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't we move to some sort of system where it's no longer necessary? Or maybe just a very skeletal one to start the boot process.

Microsoft.

[$$$$$exyGal]

... its possible to imagine people in a hurry booting up their Windows PC and accessing the Net using cME without touching Windows.

So Windows crashes, and you can't get it to come back up. No problem! You just boot up into your BIOS, send the built-in web-browser to support.microsoft.com, and then your set. Except one problem: Microsoft decides (accidentally) to send your BIOS browser really unusable HTML. The end result is you can't diagnose your Microsoft problem because you aren't using a certified Microsoft product.

--sex

Re:Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, obviously, Microsoft should supply the BIOS code as well ($for$a$fair$price$). Really I'm surprised they don't already. Surely Windows PCs could be more consistent and reliable if they did?

I'm being facetious, but why *hasn't* Microsoft attempted to control PC BIOS firmware? It would have seemed a natural thing for them to do, given their propensities. Is it just fear of antitrust legislation?

Easy to tell the difference between the two

[Anonymous Coward]

An OS crashes..

whereas you'd hope that a BIOS doesn't..

Big stuff filtering down..

[Richard_at_work]

As usual, this just seems to be a case of stuff origionally designed for big expensive systems coming down to lower levels. IBM servers tend to have this functionality, hell on our F50 at work you can dial in using a modem when the AIX OS isnt running, the bios/firmware will take care of you. The AlphaPC164 i was jsut given suprised me by having a almost full unixlike OS as its firmware (SRM).

This has happened with SCSI, raid, SMP etc so it doesnt suprise me to find a BIOS that does more than normal, and in many cases it is a bonus, depending on wether it does certain things. I use serial consoles a lot, and would love to have a better way to talk to the computer at a really low level, without resorting to expensive hardware.

Re:Big stuff filtering down..

[spinlocked]

The AlphaPC164 i was jsut given suprised me by having a almost full unixlike OS as its firmware (SRM).

This is what I love about Sun hardware. You have a complete FORTH interpreter in the OpenBoot PROM, you can 'cd /' and 'ls' to get a list of devices, you can 'test net' or 'watch-net' to diagnose network issues, 'probe scsi' to find SCSI devices, etc. etc. A few months ago I wrote a little bit of FORTH which would make the chassis LED blink, so I could find a particular box in a rack full of kit. Marvellous. The lights-out managment features on the newer boxes allow you get to the PROM through the console line when the machine is switched off - well, enough of the PROM to let you power up the machine remotely - this was fantastic for one datacentre that I've worked in, you had to give security 24 hours notice if you needed entry to the facility.

hard disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Resides in a protected area of the harddisk".
I think we all know what this means! Track 0 anyone? This could be interesting for TurboTax, and all the other horribly crippled applications forced on consumers nowadays.

file system access

[binaryDigit]

Usually the two most critical items needed to help a problem system is file system access and then some basic editing tool. If this bios can come with

1 - your choice of file system driver (ntfs, ufs, whateverfs)
2 - a raw sector editor
3 - a simple text file editor

That would be a godsend. A tcp/ip stack with telnet/ftp would also be very useful, but I could live without that.

floppy replacement

[g4dget]

I think this sure beats BIOS upgrades and OS installs via floppies--if they do it right. Imagine being able to just point the BIOS at an IP address in order to download the initial disk image via HTTP, or being able to use the BIOS to partition the disk and copy an initial disk image from a USB drive. Right now, trying to do the equivalent by, say, booting a Linux rescue disk can be hard--most Linux rescue disks still don't know how to deal with USB devices, and network boots are a pain to set up and don't (generally) work through firewalls or HTTP. This is particularly nice for lightweight portable devices that may not have much in the way of drives or interfaces, but they will have networking and possibly USB.

If they do it wrong, however, it might be a nightmare of DRM, spyware, and commercial apps sitting in weird disk partitions. That, we definitely don't need. I don't want my machine reporting to Phoenix every time I boot, for example.

I hope, however, that Phoenix will be cut out of the loop. Something like the Linux BIOS or OpenFirmware make a whole lot more sense to me as the basis for this.

Re:Bad

[Pharmboy]

BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System, and as for the idea of enahancing the BIOS kindof defeats the purpose of having a bare bones way of controling the hardware, however if it is implemented well, it could provide a good intermediate level between the BIOS and a full OS for low level diagnostics, but i don't see a need for web browsing.

Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?

I mean most support for computers is online now, and its kinda hard to log in to "dell.com" if the damn thing won't boot.

Why can't the bios be both? for instance: IBM used to have a BASIC interpretor in bios (286 and pre), but it didnt get used unless the system didn't find an OS. It didn't get in the way.

Re:Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post was a joke, of course (did no one else notice the bit about "tying" browser and OS?). But you raise an interesting point. Is the BIOS acronym really descriptive anymore? It seems as if current PC OSes don't use it beyond the most basic boot, where DOS and CP/M actually used it for, well, I/O services to talk to the hardware. Isn't much of the BIOS 16-bit code anyway? I thought that (and bugginess/poor performance/Windowscentricity) was kind of why Linux and FreeBSD eschew the BIOS routines after the barest, earliest part of the boot cycle.
Really, isn't it Basic Bootstrap Services nowadays?

IEEE 1275

[pretoris]

I've always wondered why IEEE 1275 / OpenBIOS / OpenFirmware never caught on. IMO it is a much better and much more powerful alternative to the closed and aging BIOS found in most PC's. People are always complaining about "Closed" operating systems but don't bat an eye that their BIOS is closed...

Halt and Catch Fire

[yerricde]

there isn't anything about BIOS programming that is proprietary or costly

What about talking to the motherboard's chipset? Many chipsets have settings that if accidentally triggered could make the motherboard HCF. Of course, the official BIOS is careful never to trigger those settings, but just randomly poking at the I/O registers could do Bad Things.

question on the OS - BIOS relation

[Maimun]

After the BIOS hands the control of the
machine to the OS, to what extent is the
BIOS used, if at all? I mean, userspace
code cannot circumvent the OS -- if it tries,
the process gets killed by the OS. AFAIK, there
is no such a relation between the OS and the BIOS:
if the OS tries to circumvent the BIOS and talk
directly to some device, it does not get killed.

So, the BIOS is not a layer below the OS,
right? I am talking about real OS's, not DOS
or 'doze 95.

Re:Bad

[WhaDaYaKnow]

I totally agree this is bad.

I understand Phoenix is trying to protect their business, but really, the days of the BIOS as it is should be over.

The BIOS is a legacy piece of crap that serves practically no purpose, but to boot the OS.

The services provided for the "Input/Output" go largely unused, mainly because the majority are 16 bit services and no modern OS has a way to call them in the first place (well, without a high latency). Even the 32 bit services go largely unused,- PCI for example is practically always implemented by a driver that does direct IO vs. calling the BIOS.

In other words, non of the most prominent operating systems call the BIOS for services such as RS-232, IDE, LPT, Video, you name it, after the apprioriate drivers are loaded.

The REAL purpose of the BIOS should be: initialize the hardware up to a point so that it can boot the OS. This means memory initialization, some timer and interrupt related stuff and whatever code is required for the boot devices (I personally think IDE and Ethernet are the most important, but I can see that USB and SCSI are important to a lot of people)

After that the BIOS should load the OS image and be done.

Don't think I'm making this thing up; I've actually implemented a boot loader that completely eliminated the need for a BIOS and it was very fast; ready to boot of the harddrive as soon as the harddrive was spin up (e.g. 3 seconds!)

LinuxBIOS is doing something similar.

Anyways, sorry for this little rant without any proper links or so, but I gotta go to be in time for Apres-Ski happy hour! :-)

Re:Bad

[Spoing]

The BIOS is a legacy piece of crap that serves practically no purpose, but to boot the OS.

Let's hammer that home, shall we? Instead of a minimialist BIOS setup, Award and Asus have decided that the following features are more important than conextual help on the P4PE (rev. 1.03) board;

1. Audio POST messages; yep, it speaks the error messages.

2. Graphical boot logo; yep, an advertisement for Asus.

3. 6 types of power on options:
   1. AC power loss restart,
   2. wake/power up on external modem,
   3. power up on PCI card,
   4. power up by PS/2 keyboard,
   5. by mouse,
   6. Automatic power up each day at a specific time,
   7. Automatic power up by a specific day of the month with alarm

4. ...yet, no boot option for USB or firewire devices; no boot off of that USB pen or external CDRW.

   That's not all...

5. Turn off some of the ports (game, serial, ...) and the system either won't boot or it will disable other seemingly unrelated ports.

6. Automatic boot into BIOS setup after boot. This is supposed to reset CPU timings if the system crashes due to overclocking. Please. This time around, unlike the old versions of this misguided feature, it is possible to disable it.

7. ...speaking of disabling things, the boot sector virus detection scheme never made any sense to me. How many years has it been since there has been any boot sector viri -- yet the damn thing has to be turned off much of the time.

Tom's Hardware gave this one a thumbs up?