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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."
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.
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...
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!