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BIOS' Days Are Numbered
Ninja Master Gara writes "While this article shows Phoenix expanding the uses of the bios, ZDNet UK reports Intel is looking to get rid of it altogether, to be replaced with the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) as announced at the Intel Developer Forum. EFI promises a considerable amount of flexibility to system control and startup, legacy support, and programability. And it gets rid of text mode only start up too."
In that case, how will be Paladium be implanted? Does Phoenix will have (forced to?) have the paladium's required functions?
No more bios? Might as well cancel my cable, Biography was one of the only good shoes on A&E.
Trolling is a art,
but why dont they use openfirmware?
...are cool! I don't need fancy graphics just so that my graphics card can get it's early morning POST exercise.
Why do we need to glorify the start-up screen when text can do just fine... If I wanted glorified startup screens I'd boot up my AIX RS/6000 thank you very much.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
If we can't get rid of other widely spread things like the TCP/IP protocol, what makes you think we can get rid of BIOS?
by giving it some other fancy name! U need to have something between hardware and the OS. Call it whatever you want to call
Umm. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. OEMs like to have startup screens that disguise the text mode stuff going on invisibly...
So will we finally be able to embed (part of) our favourite OS into the PC hardware? Remember the Amiga OS ... it had parts of its OS inside the ROM (intuition and other libraries (for graphics drawing and windowing)). A step forward... couple this with FlashCard RAM or otherwise.. and you can make some nice embedded systems. (Real NetPCs running linux with no CD/HD anyone?)
What else is there to say? OpenFirmware works nice
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Goodbye floppy drive.
Wow, think what you could do with a Beowulf Cluster of EFIs...
Sounds like Intel wants to reinvent the wheel. I hope they realize that Open Firmware exists. Or is it their version of embrace and extend?
Anandtech has a page about EFI as well. It also includes pictures of computers with EFI.
All computers do have a bios. Its a Basic Input/Output system that is required by all current OS. Without a bios you could never run your shiny windows xp. (i know you don't use linux, that's for sure!)
If BIOS isn't broken, one wonders why there needs to be a fix. One can pretty confidently assume that such a change would usher in stricter enforcement for DRM. And I'm sure it simply solidifies the work MS largely completed through its XP registration scheme. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but can any of you blame me?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
You are an all new spelling for moron...
Just use the PROM on Sun systems. Its much better
than using the bios and it is much easier to boot
into multiple operating systems (or even different
versions of the same OS). Personally, I find the
bios and the lack of configurability the most annoying thing
on x86 systems. Its really annoying that an OS also
needs a boot loader outside of the prom in order to run.
With the prom, you just name the disk and optionally the
file to boot from and the OS will boot from there.
Glad the bios is going buy buy.
That's ridiculous. BIOS in a modern computer is the thing that initializes the devices, talks to the disk, fetchs a portion of the OS from the disk, executes it. You're probably referring to the "Setup" thingy, which is - typically - on all modern computers, just not always easily accessible.
Great, another piece of hardware/software trying to do more than it should that won't work very well, and be just one more source of blame when things aren't working. Sweet.
All circuits busy.
Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.
If you're a geek, you definitely want the boot information. If you're not, just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You are confusing a lack of a good BIOS-menu interface, with the lack of a Basic Input-Output System. No computer as of yet can get by without something to control the input an output from and to the user. Otherwise you have a box that you can't give work to, and can't get the answer from.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
OpenBoot, its an IEEE standard, Sun and Apple use it, its user programable, and cool as hell. Thankfully I rarely use it though, our (production) sun boxes have been nearly flawless since I started. Playing with it at Sun Sysadmin I class last week was one of the neatest things I've done in awhile on a PC. Do any of the other Unix (HPaq, SGI, IBM) vendors use OpenBoot?
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Well the Bios almost outlived the floppy ;).
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Is this similar to the Open Firmware found in Macs and Sun machines? Never did get a chance to play around with that so I'm not sure if there's a similarity.
Oh Lord, here comes a system upgrade that I can't ignore, together with all their draconian licensing. I'm finally going to have to let the mouse access the internet.
Is that Intel speak for Paladium? No thanks, Intel.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I mean, even my 1992 Toyota uses EFI . Way to keep up with the times, Intel!
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Also wouldn't this mean that we have to have some storage device in the machine? Could we still boot off a network connection if we didn't have a HD?
Tomorrow's news: Intel gives Phoneix the boot, or would that be take away the boot?
Either way, Instant ON is way overdue.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers...
I'm guessing Microsoft is already adding code to windows to wipe out that last part from machines, as it might "confuse people"...
Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Not sure someone who cannot spell "apostrophe" should be commenting one someone else's use of it, whether correct or incorrect.
"We even have a concept of the afterlife" said Doran, "so if your OS freezes you can go in and look at the state of the machine, change configuration, load a different driver, and do a sensible restart."
so their plan is..
1)Create new layer between bios and os
2)Say it helps when your OS crashes
3)have it log system stats so users can see what went wrong
4)Re-invent all the kernel-logging utilities
5) Profit!
seriously folks, a graphical kernel logging utility would be pretty handy. you could have it start after a crash instead of kdm/gdm/xdm, so you can find the problem before you go under again.
At least the war on the environment is going well
"With the BIOS, that's limited to VGA or worse, but EFI supports high resolution displays"
What a junk. How about making reliable and full functional serial console like big boys Sun and HP?
At the same game with what looks to be the samething that Phoenix is trying to do but more advanced. Compaired to this I would rather have a traditional bios. The OS functionality of EFI looks to be the perfect boot loader for for TCPA. Such as containing the bootloader in firmware and controlling the OS's drivers.
GTA3 is like the Sims to me - MC Hawking
So Intel are going to give me a graphical interface, nice. The question is, and here come the obvious:-
.fill in your own inane comments. . .?
1. Will it run Linux?
2. What games are available for it?
3. Will it be Open Source?
4. Will it be called BIO$?
5. Will it . .
Oh no! My INT 10 and INT 08 won't work anymore..
to any BIOS company execs (or those that depend on those companies) you need to adapt the BIOS and start actually driving innovation instead of just trying to hold onto your outdated methods in an irrational hope that everyone will just stop progressing the IT industry. I am sure there are many out there worried about calls like this from Intel and others but why haven't the BIOS folks been more proactive in adapting and themselves being the ones pushing for better methods?
Apple used to do this on one of their early machines , I can't remember which (possibly the first Classic). Basically Apple had a swag of extra Rom space and they put in a cut down version of the system and finder. Great if you had problems with your machine.
Go out and get sailing!
" whats a bios? in all the newer computers ive seen that havent been built by the users, there is no bios."
Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about because all computers have a BIOS.
You ask "what's a bios" which indicates you don't know what it is and then you claim to know that there are computers without it ? How can you know that acomputer doesn't have a BIOS in it if you don't even know what a BIOS is to begin with?
While the parent does display some ignorance, how is it a troll?
I can't tell you how many times I was stymied by BIOS crapolla while consulting.
I still don't pretend to understand all of it, but what bothered me was that I used to go to these Toronto computer shows and there would be these little books for sale on the BIOS, 4 of them, consisting of 5 pages of 8 x 10 photocopies folded over and stapled in the middle with a cheap colour cover on them. In other words, cheapest possible production values.
They went into detail on the BIOS and were EXACTLY what I needed, but the guy wanted twenty five bucks EACH for them.
I wouldn't have bought them even if I could, but I swore one day I would and publish them for free all over the BBS world (This was pre-Internet)
Now it looks like I won't have to, but I'm still pissed off. Charging a fortune for stuff people really needed is wrong.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
"Normal" home users, the kinds of people who might benefit from a GUI, probably don't want to talk to anything other than their main, mainstream OS. And power users and network administrators want the hardware to come with a system that can be scripted, extended, and remotely controlled. And almost everything that needs to be done with the BIOS-replacement should be done from the regular OS, which can leave little scripts in non-volatile areas for what the BIOS-replacement should do when it reboots (as opposed to putting those instructions into the user's brain).
Yes, the BIOS needs a serious overhaul, and, yes, it needs to change a bit in the direction of becoming a better OS. But it should become a better OS that normal users never have to talk to directly. It should become a 32bit/64bit OS that much more than previously accomplishes its magic behind the scenes. If it needs a GUI at all, the GUI should probably consist of a web server (so that the BIOS can be configured over the net) and a built-in, simple web browser, not some Microsoft-wannabe-lookalike.
We need to start chopping some of the legacy fat out of systems now a days.
It's kind of annoying still seeing things like standard x86 startup screens.
It seems like intel has been on a rampage of reform lately. With the Intanium2 (in hopes of getting rid of the ancient x86 chipset architecture), the Centrino (to give laptops better battery life), and now this bios change.
- tristan
Man, I LIKE the text only boot up. Whenever they add a fancy GUI functionality is lost, or at least hidden.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
They aren't getting rid of BIOS, they are just making it bigger (and more bloated). Claiming that they are "getting rid of" the BIOS is just their way of hyping their new, lucky-special BIOS. I write BIOS code for a living [shudder] and I've seen EFI. A better name for it would be "C-BIOS" or something like that, because that's what it is: a BIOS written in C. They've packed a lot of things into it, which may or may not be useful, like networking and a GUI. They've been pushing EFI for a long time, and I don't think they've had much success. I guess that they'll just force it down everyone's throat by putting it on all of their own chipsets and hope everyone else will follow suit. Personally, as a BIOS d00d, I hope that they have about as much success with this as they did with Rambus. :)
see this post from last november.
Ya, I remember that. You held down Option-Apple at boot before the Happy Mac appeared and it would boot from it. I don't remember if it was the SE or the Classic either.
Karrots
I just can't wait! I'm sure that a high resolution splash screen instead of real information about the progress of the self test will boost my productivity, and reduce the total cost of ownership tremendously!
This indicates just how desperate the industry is to keep the market from saturating.
openfirmware is usable rather than pretty?
because it proves that a firmware can be cooler without ASCII art or pain-in-the-arse GUI?
OpenFirmware, for those who don't know, is a solution adopted by Sun, Apple, and other big names. A partition on the hard disk contains the firmware which can be accessed through certain key combos. You can then give it commands to boot certain partitions and other such shit; stuff I'd like in my peecee's BIOS.
Check it out.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
oh man, how ignorant can you possibly be?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I don't know about HPaq or IBM, but I do know that SGI uses an ARCS PROM. It's similar to OpenBoot/OpenFirmware, and can be used for booting into other OSes (NetBSD/MIPS for one), but it's not quite as feature-filled. Newer SGIs (Origin 300, Origin 3000, Fuel, Altix) also have an "L1" controller system that keeps track of temperatures, module power, system partitioning, etc. It's somewhat similar to Sun's LOM controllers, though several SGI L1 devices can be connected to an L2 controller (touch screen LCD controller) or to an L3 controller (a 1U rackmount PC running Linux driving a fancy GUI and web interface).
ok, I did a little googleing and found the specifics. So all you out there with Mac Classics laying around you can push Command-Option-x-o and it will boot System 6.03, Finder 6.1x. I did it once years ago I was pretty impressed.
g gs/HW -Classic.html
Info thanks to:
http://www.cupertino.de/pages/archiv/EasterE
Karrots
OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) has a homepage. As does the IEEE working group. There's also a DMOZ/Google category.
SGI's first attempt at Wintel PCs, the overengineered and overdue 320 and 540, used a prom interface similar to what SGI MIPS/IRIX, Sun, and modern Apples use. There were both graphical and text/command-line interfaces available. A fellow could use this nifty maintanence system to choose the boot device, get system info, even run some diagnostics... just like a "real" workstation. Pretty neat, but probably one of the reasons that these cool machines can't run anything newer than Windows 2000.
What happens if the hard drive fails? The CNet article says that the filesystem is stored on the hard drive. And how much space will the file system take up? I hope they have thought of this.
http://phreakinb.com
My first thought was GRUB....and after seeing the screenshots... I think, ok "WinGRUB". ;)
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
In 99 using a Compaq machine that had a graphical boot loader that sat on the HD. This had a simple window intreface to control Hardware configuration and other stuff. While is just felt like windows 3.1, ( a point and click interface ontop of a command mode backend ) it worked ALOT like what is described here. Personally using HD space for the bios sucks. One of the great things about PC's that you can yank out the drives, slap a new one in.. and most of the time boot right up. But now your going to tie the HD to the machine hardware so to the degree of of the bios. And what happens when I dont want to give up partion entry for the bios replacment? I agree that the PC bios sucks.
I much more prefer the OpenFirmware approach, but I think the key here is that the bios(or its replacment) needs to reside on the mother board as thats what it primarly configures. Do you really want your Bios to start tooling around on a NTFS partion to recover the machine ? Shouldnt that be something the OS does? A better bios that could do console on serial/ network addess would be cool. A better bios that could intelligantly pass
paramaters to the system would be cool. A bios thats going to suck up HD space, and fux with the filesystem, no thanks.
"Hello, Dell? I forgot the password to my EFI" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
That should be "Bios's Days Are Numbered."
scott
Best example was the 320 Visual workstation.
I don't think it is smart to add complexity to a damn near hardwired system. If there is one of the "cool" bugs found in the bios replacement how would you ever be able to fix it? This sounds somewhat dangerous to me.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Bios days are in binary...
All days are numbered, but bios is done in binary.
(It's a vague attempt a humour... laugh.)
~ kjrose
Like a lot of people here, I've been wondering why Intel is trying to reinvent the wheel when OpenBoot is both flexible and reliable. It's a little intimidating for Forth newbies (like myself), but I've never had a problem with any of the Sun or Apple boxen that use OF.
The motivation behind EFI is probably simple economics. Intel has effectively maximized their revenue from CPUs. This forces them to branch into other markets to keep the profits growing and the stockholders happy. By improving on the BIOS they make a more compelling case for Intel chipsets, especially in the highly profitable server arena.
OpenFirmware is an open standard, so other chipset vendors could implement their own OF solutions without ever paying a dime to Intel. EFI is probably patent encumbered and represents a nice opportunity to collect fat license checks from companies like VIA and ServerWorks. Also, MS has demonstrated how profitable controlling a platform can be. Intel's probably trying to extend their strong processor position so that they have more control over your computer. OF is, well, open. That makes it kind of suck as a monopoly extension tool.
That's what I've come up with, anyways. If anyone's got a better theory please share.
This
But I like text mode only start-up. I live for it! What good are your graphics when your mouse and/or keyboard doesn't work, then what is your dumbass gonna do? Eh?
personally, I'm kinda excited about microsoft's involvement with the whole thing. NOT! Does this mean that they get to screw up my computer before I even load an OS? (which prolly won't be windows anyhow)
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
Bios are what a band sends out to magazines and other publications to tell them all about themselves. A self written advertisement or blurb, if you will. It's relationship with a computer, i'm not so sure about. I guess you could type it up on Word?
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
If the EFI has legacy support, wouldn't that mean it has to contain all of the BIOS calls and functions anyway? I really don't see why this needs to change, though the idea of a purely graphical bootup is pretty cool.
Bork Bork Bork!!
From the article:
"As part of the demonstration, he showed a network driver being replaced on a live machine, as well as multiple reconfigurations of various USB devices"
I wonder if he ever heard of some fancy new initiatives in the Linux world called "rmmod" or "modprobe". Sounds pretty Gee-Whiz to me!
Not all computers have a BIOS. Sun computers, for one example use openprom instead. It is based on Forth and among other advantages over the backwards BIOS, it allows the boot up process be controlled by the serial port.
1) Log it somewhere only accessable through an obscure state-of-the-industry key sequence held at boot (I propose ctrl-Alt-~-F5-j-F9-q-}(yes, with all the shifts)-\).
2) Make it post so damn fast that nobody even notices
It had a huge "EFI" badge on the back. IIRC, the 4M-E was the first mass-produced Toyota with EFI (analog EFI at that.)
It's located on the hard drive? Uhhh... what happens with a bad sector? What happens with the first EFI virus? What happens when you swap out hard drives? I think there are some details the article glossed over or skipped entirely.
EFI? You mean my computer's BIOS now has Electronic Fuel Injection?
"Because it gives a new level of control over the hardware, it's also of interest to digital rights management and security designers."
So basically what we have here is combined BIOS/Boot track that Turbo Tax has explicit *permission* to write to, but perhaps you don't?
Oh, gee, goody. Just what I had asked Santa for.
KFG
Maybe you need to get out more often.
Well, I'm sure support could be in linux just by releasing all the specs...
Doesn't mean it can't/won't have POST data... Aside from that, wouldn't this be a sort of first-steps toward embedded systems? Or at least semi-embedded systems?
Who doesn't like free music?
Personally, I'd like mine to boot up like that one out of the film "Alien", complete with flickery graphics and blipping as it writes to the display. I always thought that looked cool. I certainly don't need reminding who built the motherboard in 16 million colours every time I start up.
And another thing - what's to stop MS "embracing" a few MB makers and converting the boards to boot only one OS - say, for example, Windows? It would be trivial to add proprietary code to this, which prevented anything else booting - obviously then anyone adding the required code to boot, say, anything else would be violating our favourite law...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Here's my question: what happens if your hard drive dies? If the diagnostic tools are stored on a portion of your hard drive, and you need these tools to recover ... isn't it the chicken or the egg syndrome?
Also, what happens if you decide to upgrade your hard drive? are you stuffed then? how do you reload the EFI tools?
This is so stupid, it's replacing the bios with a newer form of bios. big fn deal... The bios needs to really be replaced, like the linux bios project. That thing boots in a couple of seconds and you're in linux. All we need is a way to upgrade the kernel we use with it and we're all set.
sorry, for once, the grammar on slashdot is correct. ___s' (no trailing s) is the proper way to make a possessive of a singular noun ending in s.
you fail.
this new EFGI thing may be susceptible to viruses
I dont want my BIOS to require service packs.
They mention placing the EFI/BIOS on a reserved area of the the hard drive. Everyone knows magnetic media is extremely vulnerable, hence a BIOS on a non erasable EPROM (or at least backup).
Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash says a BIOS is NOT a basic input/output system, but rather a Built In Operating System!!!
/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor at your RH8 prompt before modding) screen saver. THANX!!!
...yes, I use RH8 and I am obsessed with the phosphor (please type
Looks like this will do the job of the BIOS + boot sector. Track 0 on the HD isn't reserved anymore, so now where is Intuit going to hide the "copy protection" for the latest version of TurboTax, hmm?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First of all, I'll link to my post two days ago.
Intel however, doesn't seem to quite understand the issue. I mean, EFI is partially stored on the hardrive?! Sounds to me they are making things more complex, instead of less.
The quote " In effect, it's a tiny operating system in its own right," scares the shit out of me.
And all this hype about graphics, I mean, come on. I wrote a boot loader in 64K that booted straight into true color, 800x600 graphics mode, including a compressable image. It's not a big deal. And of course "With the BIOS, that's limited to VGA or worse" is horseshit, the BIOS can use the VESA BIOS to switch to any mode it desires. This is all a non-issue. It's been solved.
Yes, network diagnostics is good. But I'd rather have a secure network boot, because then I can do anything, including loading a remote OS even though the harddrive shat on itself.
The BIOS is the last place on the PC where people have to write in low-level assembler code, and we want to end that" he said. Instead, EFI is almost entirely written in C,
Bullshit, there are BIOSs that are written in C. Actually, my bootloader is written in C++. There.
so if your OS freezes you can go in and look at the state of the machine, change configuration, load a different driver, and do a sensible restart
Yeah right, I can totally see my mom do that. I've spent hours trying to get Windows XP Embedded to NOT probe a secondary IDE channel because it was not terminated correctly and would hang the boot, using the kernel debugger and all. Never got it to work. And this is going to all work just like that?
Finally, it can pretend to be a BIOS. "We're not expecting people to throw out the BIOS overnight, so EFI can support legacy systems by running on top of an existing BIOS and handing over control when appropriate."
Ah! I was wondering where that backwards compatibility was. I'm so happy that we are moving one step forwards and two steps back.
Yep, this probably sounds a flamebait, a silly rant, whatever. There's some good ideas there, but I don't think they are on the right track...
At the end of the day, the BIOS (boot loader) should be in Flash (ROM) so that it still works even if there's no harddrive. It should get the hell done with all hardware initialization and boot the frigin OS. Putting more complexity in the BIOS means more bugs, means more updates, means more security risks.
I want grub in my BIOS, and I want each OS to write to the partition's boot record, not the master boot record. This way, you wouldn't have to worry about windows overwriting your MBR etc.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I noticed that few people LOOKED at the entire article. It seems that 99% of you talk about the GUI boot manager but have COMPLETELY missed the TEXT shell support.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Hooray!! Do it! Now!
Somebody ought to invent a bootloader similar to Lilo or Grub which actually implements the OpenFirmware standard. That would be cool. Of course, then it really would live in a partition on the hard disk rather than in ROM.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Considering that major board manufactuers are pushing LinuxBios, I suspect that in about 2-3 years from now, they will all have the ability to load Linux or BSD in the bios. It will save 5-10 / 50-80 board; enable boot-up in a couple of seconds; allow for some neat embedded systems with very low power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My 1980 Volvo has fuel injection, though it seems that Chevy used fuel injection starting from the 50's also.
Maybe it's just a poor choice of words. The first thing that appears on my computer (and I've noticed it on Suns going back a couple of decades) is a graphic from the graphics card.
But having a text mode is a good thing. Bootstrapping is a validation of the system's computeworthiness. If it crashes, you want to be able to see where it was and what it was doing. You can't do that if the contextual data are hidden behind the Logo screen Windows puts up.
(See here for how to disable that.)
I think they've gone way overboard here. I don't want a "special" area on the hard drive reserved for the EFI.
A BIOS (by any name) should be small, and not need much storage space.
You mean you'd use up space on MY HARD DRIVE?
Like, a hidden partition?
1) DRM => eww
2) reformat => no boot?
3) proprietary agreement = difficult to make work with other OS's?
Seriously, yo, use a BIOS you trust. Life a life you love. Don't take it all too seriously.
...text mode? I mean isn't that where it all started? (Besides the old old old on/off switches)
I always hated those GUI BIOS that you can use you mouse to clickty click and crap.
Help me get a PSP! Who can afford s
I've always kinda like my text only BIOS. It discourages normal users from screwing around in it. It has a nice K.I.S.S. principle about it, too.
Maybe it's just that whole "the more you put in, the more can break" kinda thing.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
3 second Linux-rom boots on PCs by replacing the BIOS ROM ... I can't seem to find them via google, though
Have you tried just putting Linux and BIOS into a Google query? First two results: The LinuxBIOS Home Page and Slashdot | Linux BIOS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'd like to see Intel machines support serial consoles - that kind of stuff comes in very handy in a datacenter.
Yeah! Lets put more flashy graphics and stuff into the BIOS bootup stuff.. after all, we want to make sure you can't manage your server remotely^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwithout a keyboard/mouse/video attached to it.
Damn, we managed like 70 sun boxes remotely with nothing more than a Sun U1 with a bunch of Aurora serial boards in it. Worked great, I could boot the box, install an OS (with the tech at the remote data center putting a CD in for me)... all without having to drive 3 hours to get there. I rebuilt 15 boxes from scratch, OS install, patch clusters, security layer, and application software, and at least 1/2 of those I did while sitting in sweats and a t-shirt at home drinking coffee.
Naah... lets throw a GUI in there, just to make remote management more difficult...
All three of these use packet writing to write to a CDRW with a UDF filesystem. I don't know why these packages don't have more visibility, because they're the missing link that answers all the arguments as to why CDRW can't replace floppy.
Probably because 1. you have to have a validly licensed copy of DirectCD or some other UDF driver on each machine you read a UDF disc on (file system drivers on Windows are not free software because Microsoft charges $1000 for the file system development header files and documentation), 2. it takes nearly a minute to mount or unmount a UDF disc on my machine with a 10x burner (as opposed to two seconds with a floppy), and 3. you still can't copy files from older computers (made before 1999 or so) that didn't come with a built-in CD recorder.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Intel has links to elilo and stuff on one of their pages. Good to see Intel is taking care of the Free software people as well as MS, with this as well as ACPI.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
This whole "new BIOS" concept falls short of the obvious. Why not use a slightly more generous-sized but still fairly cheap flash memory (that can be copied, or maybe mapped, into normal virtual address space), and put the kernel and some of the more basic parts of the OS into it, and eliminate the loader? My root filesystems are typically only 64Mbytes. Flash memories can be rewritten many more times than I'll ever upgrade my OS. How about a tiny "RAM disk" to provide the parts of a root filesystem that have to be writeable (mount points, /dev)? Initialize it from read-only /bin, /sbin, and kernel in flash.
All the "BIOS vendor" needs to supply is a little protected part that initializes the hardware, and allows the bigger part of the flash memory to be written from the ethernet.
I see a double edge sword with basing EFI with a common language like C. It's great because C isn't that difficult of a language to learn, and most colleges around the US still offer courses teaching the language (great news for those of you looking to pick up a few extra course credits.) Which tells me that sooner or later there might be an abundance of utilities written to use within your future EFI setup.
But on the cutting side of this blade, I see that using a language that is pretty accessible to learn, could mean even more havoc in a already pretty chaotic realm of keeping dirty malicious code off (y)our systems. And what about Paladium? Is it me or does this give a big green flag to the RIAA and other big corps trying to cash in on supporting them, to be able to push thier "Digital Rights" acts?
So forgive me if I'm not doing cartwheels Intel fans, I just see this as a great idea for use in a perfect world, but deffinately no good for this one we live in.
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Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
No, more like a Commodore 64. The BASIC interpreter built into the Apple IIGS ROM didn't have a file system driver and thus couldn't save or load programs. (Unlike the Apple IIe, the GS didn't have a line-in connector for tape program storage.) One had to boot to Apple DOS 3.3, Diversi-DOS, or ProDOS to be able to save or load programs. The C=64, on the other hand, did have a file system in ROM.
Will I retire or break 10K?
AMEN.... My thoughts exactly, even though I agreed about the apostrophe misuse.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
True. To be fair, in the book he was talking about a motorcycle (which had "smart wheels" that could ride over a curb without a bump!), so perhaps we can give him a little leeway for creative license ;-)
Interestingly, he KNEW it was incorrect before publication - in the Acknowledgements at the back of my paperback copy, he says the mistake was caught in the galley editing stage. He decided to leave it that way because he thought it sounded better in the context of the writing.
Freedom: "I won't!"
So I turned it off. Now if there are any video card problems, I won't hear about them.
A "error only" mode would have been nice.
- support for booting off various medium such as floppy, cd, hd, usb fobs, and smartmedia if equipped.
- ability to have everything from the moment I power up redirected to a serial port (our Dells do this and it is great) similar to the way the big boys like HP's, Suns, etc... do. Of course this means ditch the GUI boots.
- FAST booting. Don't scan to see if every piece of hardware that has been there for the last 6 months is still there unless I ask you to. Unless I hit some keysequence to go into diags, take only the time to read the boot rom image then go right to whatever the first boot device is and start booting.
- tons and tons of little config options with a manual written in English, not Engrish.
2) Insert Palladium(TM)
3) Profit!!!
Compaq allready has had everything your talking about in there remote insite boards they fully redirect the console can deal with virtual floppies and CDRom's and even have there own power as an option. IT has it's own nic and pretty much looks like a server class video card (allthough I think 8 megs of ram is a bit much for a server card but hey)
Now the things I would like to see are better Serial interace and open bios has provided this on Sum hardware at least (Cmon it's like 2 IO pins to deliver 9600 baud serial to a management port and serial port servers are cheap)
No sir I dont like it.
and I will keep demanding until I pass and/or whip mindless monkeys into buying into my rhetoric and using sound bites instead of being consistent
Right here in Chapter II. The very first rule of elementary usage in The Elements of Style (my favorite book in the whole wide world.)
And another thing - what's to stop MS "embracing" a few MB makers and converting the boards to boot only one OS
The Antitrust settlement.
But quite frankly, when you look at the sorry 3-year-late state of ACPI support in Linux, Microsoft can effectively lock other OSes out with "open standards".
This will stop you from building your own box.
You mobo won't boot unless you install a preloaded HDD. You HDD of course will be preloaded with M$ and of course you WILL pay for it.
You can be sure that it will be loaded with backdoors and spyware for BIG BROTHER, M$ and RIAA-MPAA.
Welcome to the New World Order.
This is one more piece of the Patriot Act Puzzle, aka PAP....
From the article:
I hope they're referring to the boot track, but this still worries me:
1) They're not referring to the boot track. They make a separate 5 meg partition at the start of the first drive. This gets obliterated whenever a stupid/inexperienced user/tech repartitions, and the whole machine crashes to a halt.
2) They're referring to the boot track. DRM schemes from e.g. that tax software mentioned the other day on slashdot (too tired to look) gleefully overwrites part of it, and your computer will not boot - or even load the preboot software. Your dreams of running an operating system are dashed.
3) It uses the boot track, but everyone suddenly gets religion and treats the boot track like sacred space. No one ever dreams of overwriting it. Intel makes up with AMD. George Bush makes up with Saddam Hussein, who then shows his good faith by helping Bush improve his English. The world is as it should be. The BIOS works exactly as designed, but is absolutely useless when you try to boot a diskless machine or your hard drive gets formatted/replaced, and you're screwed anyway, but who cares, because the world is happy again.
The designers seem to be hoping for option #3. Unfortunately, the sarcasm I've painstakingly inserted seems to be the most likely part of the whole paragraph, since relying on the hard drive is even stupider than relying on the BIOSes we have now, because hey, people change their hard drives, and LILO changes the boot track, and heck, DRM changes the boot track, and guess what, we all get screwed.
--Dan
So what, the POST tests don't mean anything unless they fail and then you see the messages (or maybe you hit DEL or ESC out of curiousity). In any case this is only a feature of cheaper home machines; high-end/server boards still give you copious textual information, and some (Tyan Thunderbird line and Intel motherboards IIRC) even support serial heads instead of VGA.
The coolest thing is that we'll ditch the whole real-mode wiggle dance and get straight into loading to OS cold off the media. Not that it's a huge chunk of boot time but it would simplify the boot process (and make it more flexible; imagine exiting the OS without a warm boot and selecting a different one!)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Speaning as someone who has designed a graphics accelerator chip, I can say that having to include a VGA controller is a total waste of design effort and circuit area. It's useful ONLY for boot-up on PC's, and then as soon as a real OS comes up, it's turned off and forgotten about. It's a pointless anoyance, and I'll be elated to see it go away.
The sad thing is that it will have a lot
less functionality than a tiny linux setup
on some ROMs with an NVRAM. With that setup
you have all the utilities you need
(in familiar form too). Add in code to
boot the normal OS or from NFS mount
and maybe its own RAM chip for redundancy.
The reason why BIOS exists as it does today is because motherboard manufacturers wanted to add features that the major OS's were not supporting. For example, system sleep on laptops running Windows NT. NT doesn't support that, so the BIOS was updated to do the work "under the covers". Another example is USB keyboard support. In order to have your USB keyboard work in DOS or any other legacy OS, the BIOS has a USB driver built-in that translates USB keyboard events to PS/2 keyboard commands. The OS has no idea what's going on.
All of this could have been avoided if BIOS developers weren't so goddamn lazy. I used to be one, and my co-workers were experts at hacking up the BIOS code so that it would just barely work for whatever new feature they needed to add. The last thing they were going to do is redesign anything so that it made sense. Half of the code hadn't been touched in 10 years, and there was no one left who understand it anyway.
I hear Dell is planning on laying off all their BIOS developers and moving everything to China. I can't wait until some huge customer calls because they have some obscure hardware from the 90's that won't work in their Itanium box, and the problem won't get fixed because they don't have anyone left who knows what they're doing.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I've posted elsewhere in this thread but I felt that this was necessary to get off my chest.
Are all the boot messages even necessary? Perhaps this should be what the debate is about, hm? I see no reason to remind me what drives I have installed and the fact that a keyboard's been detected. I like silence. I'd like to know when an error has occurred, sure.
I view boot time as a time of the OS doing its thing to get ready to rock and roll, not inundate the user with ridiculous messages that they probably don't care about (this, along with a huge filesystem with thousands of files that Joe Blow doesn't understand or need, are two of my biggest theories as to why the general populous doesn't accept Linux and are my personal grievances with the said OS). The Linux boot roll annoys me for this reason:
Pentium with F0 0F bug, workaround enabled.
Calibrating delay loop...210915124.125974 BogoMips.
Enabling swap space.
I'm sure there's somebody in the world that gives a wild shit about this, but I don't. I want a usable operating system, not one that vomits up every single thing it does so hackers can catch errors in their code. The boot messages should be easily turnoffable (I don't put much effort into learning Linux, so if there is a way, please don't correct me and tell me how much of an idiot I am. I have IRC for that).
A black screen would be nice, then my login screen for my choice of OS. I actually applaud Windows for this, even though I hate Microsoft products as well. XP makes the best steps for this, in my opinion.
This is flamebait. I know. I want foes. Sign up at your local recruiting office.
j!
While RPN has been lodged in my brain over the past several years, I have to say that even more useful is the HP graphing series stacks. I can leave stuff up there to check my entry or use it to store several subtotals for later calcs, I'm sure that there are TI's that have stacks, but the HPs was the one that got me first.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I think this would be grounds for another anti-trust suit against microsoft if that were the case. Possibly even a minor boycott of any manufacturer that would make a single OS board.
I wonder if Microsoft will end up using this on the next installment of the Xbox to prevent the hardware from running linux.
I predict that there is going to be a fairly rapid move towards small USB type devices for file transfer. They are more compact, hold more data, are faster and more reliable. All new PCs have had USB ports for quite a while. I very rarely need a diskette drive now.
Okay, we've been trying to get rid of the damned floppy for how long? Five years? And it's still a fundamental requirement for updating most BIOS's?
How long did it take to put the ISA bus to bed after PCI came out? Ten years?
I'd love to see the BIOS go away as much as anyone, but I just don't see this happening in a reasonable amount of time. It's just too firmly entrenched in every PC, add-in card, and software doo-dad to easily do away with. And I don't care how good the "legacy" support is, I'm sure it will not work more frequently than it does work.
Then again, I am a cynic, although you'd never know it.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Isn't that just transferring the job of the BIOS to an external BIOS instead then?
Something has to go between the hardware and the software.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
After 10 reboots and kernel recompiles today, I wonder if there's ever been research on an OS that would never (re)boot. Obviously part of it needs to be in some permanent memory. Turn the machine off and on and it keeps going from where it was. Updates change parts of it, live, without ever restarting. I wonder about something truly without a 'start'. I mean even embedded devices have a boot.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
would be the normal construct. Still not funny, but the whole "10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't" didn't strike me as clever, either.
It's a shame, really. I can't help feeling that there ought to be humor in there. Base 2 is funny.
best joke I've seen so far was instructor counting on his hands in binary - using fingers as digits. He counted up to 3 and stopped - 4 would be 100, and that would have been an extended index finger.
132 base ten = flipping the bird to the class using both hands.
We had one of if not the first 320 systems. It worked ok, though it was a bit flakey. The big problem with it was their graphics system which was integrated on to the motherboard. (called Cobalt if memory serves) Basically they rewrote the standard chipset to eek out a little extra performance. Would have been a lot of extra performance but SGI's design cycle was much too slow and within 6 months of its release you could get a Wildcat graphics card that was faster.
The fact that the graphics weren't upgradable wasn't really a serious problem. Most people in a corporate environment don't do that anyway. The problem was the custom chipset meant you needed a special version of Windows to use the machine. This quickly became more hassle than the machine was worth.
Of course SGI isn't a company that is built for the fast release cycles of the PC industry and their PCs were quickly obsoleted and overpriced. I still can't figure out what they were thinking. Trying to be all things to all people maybe. Smart folks but with the number of blunders they've made I'm somewhat astonished they aren't in bankruptcy court.
I'd like to see a computer that is as easy to put together as a modular stereo system. You pick the parts you want, use some form of standard interconnetions for power and I/O (ala FireWire standard). Just my two cents.
For information on Open Firmware see the Open Firmware home page.
Also, info about Sun and Apple implementations.
Of course, this is the way many machines used to be built: they had a big, powerful CPU for the actual work, and a small "front-end processor" (FEP) for bootstrap loading and BIOS-like functions.
GUI OSes are kind of crippling for console redirection, though, and most vendors kludge together something using PC Anywhere or other dependent tools. I was told by a Compaq rep that eventually we might see a management controller with the ability to do what some of the KVM-Over-IP people are doing, except natively in the PC management board, providing a remote keyboard/mouse/display functionality
Here, they are reinventing the wheel as well: HTTP/HTML is arguably the best GUI for these kinds of functions. But if something else is needed, VNC would seem like the right choice: a simple and open protocol.
Personally I'm interested in this and it'd be interesting to see it take off and benefit from all the usual mass-production efficiencies, as well as seing it develop more OS-like features (such as perhaps running user-supplied modules).
Sounds like the famous Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times". I don't want my computer to run yet another "interesting" operating system. I like it to bootstrap quickly and quietly into the OS of my choice.
With LinuxBIOS you can also ditch your BIOS. It really only is "easy" to do if you have your BIOS on a EEPROM thats a DIP. You can flash a slimed down version of the Linux kernel into an EEPROM (512KB min) and boot up in a couple seconds.
Provided your motherboard has a 40pin DIP socket for the EEPROM, you can replace it with a DoC (Disk on Chip) and even have a small FS on it.
For a Linux HTPC, this would be perfect. You could have your basic root FS flashed into a DoC and it could boot up to your HTPC gui in just a couple seconds -- completely tollerable by any non-geek.
Also, LinuxBIOS isn't just for x86. There are some Alpha clusters that use LinuxBIOS for their "BIOS".
The only problem with it, is that you can't easily salvage old hardware like your old P1 because usually, the EEPROM is too small.
Storing the startup code on something removable has the advantage that it's much easier to guarantee that you always have a working one around, and that you can let arbitrary software fiddle around with the startup code in whatever way it wants. Also, it means that the startup code doesn't have to be stored on disk. With 8M SmartMedia cards in the sub-$10 range (and much cheaper for manufacturers), this seems quite doable, and the additional connectors and interface logic is cheap and simple, too.
When linuxppc first came out, OpenFirmware was a godsend. You could snoop hardware info from it, tell it which disk (and where on the disk) to boot from, all kinds of fun stuff. I used it as a boot-loader on my Powerbook 3400 forever. And it's only gotten more powerful since its inception at Apple. Haven't messed with it on other platforms, though.
My favorite part was learning to write scripts in forth for making boot menus and such.
I thought EFI stood for Electronics for Imaging, Inc. http://www.efi.com/copyright.html
Wouldn't that fall into trademark infringement?
Non illegemati carborundum est!
The BIOS itself is going to have its own file system in part of the hard disk that the regular OS can't see??? Boy, who needs Windows keystroke loggers when the BIOS itself can do that invisibly? I just want to find a nice one-floppy DOS laptop at a flea market and lock it in a safe for when it becomes impossible to know what more modern computers are doing.
At first I thought they said "BSD's Days Are Numbered". I mean, I know that already, anyone with half an atrophied brain can figure that out...
I can't believe that we're seriously talking about giving the BIOS the boot!
Thank you very much. I'll be here all week...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
A Winblows PC I put together...
You mean Windblows like the one you can get on Ebay? Or the image itself?
When it is possible to show something at booting in 16 million colours it will only be a matter of a few days before someone creates a patch so that we can all boot with porn images so we can start the day right :)
The current boot process sucks.
SGI has been doing this right for years. Their PROM is network aware, can run basic diagnostics, uses a gui and just looks damn cool.
Much better to see "Welcome to Octane" than Beep Chuga Chuga.... Post complete Memtest and other garbage.
Lets just hope the process remains open enough to allow Open Code.
Blogging because I can...
Just for the record, EFI is already present on the Itanium. Oh and what is not in the article: it's damn slow for nothing. I mean seriously, it has designs so that for example if you forgot to plug in your usb keyboard before you pressed the big red button you can plug it in and it will get recognised. Did I mention the fact that on the new Itanium 2, the whole boot layers (3 in total) take up a whopping 30 seconds before anything is even shown on the screen???!! And of course then it's done yet, some more work still needs to be done.
---
6. ???
7. Profit!
EFI my be a new thing to most IA-32 users, but it's already the established standard for IA-64 firmware. So, I have hands on experience using it.
I beleive the statement about getting rid of text-mode-only startup is incorrect. I've used EFI extensively in systems that don't even have a graphics card installed, and it works just fine over a serial console.
EFI is like a little mini-OS that serves mainly as a boot loader environment, but can also be used for running simple batch scripts and executables. System configuration utilities, OS installers, and diagnostic programs are all good candidates to build as EFI executables. For example, "elilo" is a Linux boot loader built as an EFI executable. To me, EFI seems more like MS-DOS than anything else.
EFI has modular drivers, so you can support different boot devices, network stacks, etc., and use them for pre-OS-boot tasks such as installation, configuration, etc.
Since EFI can mount (some) filesystems, and the booted OS can subsequently mount the same filesystem, an EFI partition is a useful place. For example, when you build a new linux kernel, you just copy it into the mounted EFI partition, modify the elilo.conf file (also in this partition), and the next boot will boot from the new file. No more scribbling to boot records.
I can see it now...
Virus Warning (Y/N)
Memory Hole at 15MB? (Y/N)
pr0n on boot? (Y/N)
Am I the only one that finds this part a little bit scary?
Unless the reserved part of the hard disk is very well protected surely virus writers will take about 10 seconds to work out how to flatten your EFI filesystem thus causing you to lose your OS boot controller etc?
Z.
Get rid of BIOS...no more assembler, written in C...networking...graphics...LinuxBIOS?m skeptical about the GUI, I mean, Apple has had the GUI in ROM for years if I read the specs correctly, but, well, I'm just thinking about that glorified christmas tree^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGUI that runs on too many PCs these days, I mean, you don't want to expand your ROM from 4MB to 4GB just because they wanted to embed Windows XP?
Well...I'
---
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done."
-- Linus Torvalds
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
... is STILL a BIOS!
Really, what we need is a way to get stright into the OS without a boot time (or at least a milisecond one). Just like the Palm OS except for PCs.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
...what's wrong with BIOS as for now? I mean everyone here is bashing for new BIOS with BUI and probably some bells & whistles, but NOONE is asking: why the hell would WE need that?
Are you really tired of your ol' "Press DEL to enter setup" way of configuring your PC?
And the idea of having part of BIOS on your hard disk (in some hidden place, preferably) - I know it's not new - but it's really silly. I may need those utilities when my disk fails, to try and recover something, but if those applications have to be located on HD, it's really pointless.
I don't think we should get rid of BIOS. It's serving it's purpose for so many years and we all can - and should - live with that.
If it ain't broken, don't fix it - okay?
Plain old sigh.
Sorry, you must activate your EFI before being able to boot. Please note you cannot give you EFI Product Key to anyone else. You must also re-activate if you make a mistake in your EFI and need to re-install. EFI must now run EFI Update to download the latest EFI service pack from efiupdate.microsoft.com. Heh.
Any real computer uses Open Firmware, the industry-wide boot loader / lisp environment (or compatible).
I've used the interpreter twice... once to fix a FUBAR'ed NVRAM (byte by byte reprogram), and once to change the default on-boot video output setting (had the machine connected to a non-multiscan monitor, wanted to see boot messages.)
~Berj
Intel: BIOS boots software on HDD which then boots OS.
It's like comparing apples and, er... apples.
Personally, I'd prefer the stuff in a PROM, like some real computers have had for a while now (ah... the joys of a Sparc 5...).
The futility of putting essential parts of the computer architecture (essential to the OS, that is) on a semi-disposable item such as a HDD is staggering.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Once they get the standards settled those small discs store about 1.4GB and fit in most pockets. That's 1000 times more than the 3.5 inch floppy.
They are already available, its just no mass acceptance yet.
I don't think CDRWs will replace the floppy because by the time you can provide most consumers with CDRW drives with random access writes (packet writing), the DVD bunch should have got their act together.
But if they don't then well it'll be random access CDRW drives + mini CDRWs first then. Nearly 200MB of storage.
This is about adding fat not trimming.
Existing BIOS stuff isn't very fat, plus you can ignore it most of the time. You can go through the BIOS stuff to your O/S pretty fast.
Whereas what Intel is proposing stores stuff on HDDs etc. What happens if the HDDs only support Palladium or similar stuff? What if you swap drives?
Sure they are proposing a solution, but I'm not sure what the problem is yet. If they want to write a PC BIOS in C etc they can probably do it already, just manufacturers don't want to spend more on ROM.
Well maybe AMD will support this coz it could mean they'll sell more Flash mem.
(I'm assuming your requirement of transferring files "without the net" means "without the Internet".)
If you like floppies to transfer files between machines chances are that those machines don't have ethernet cards. Here's a hint: get ethernet cards.
It's a trivial matter to share files between ethernet-equipped computers. Beats floppies that's for damn sure. I'm very sorry if you are forced to work on machines that do not/cannot have ethernet cards.
blog
Hey, how long have been Macs booting graphically ? :D
19 years ? Woah, Macs always have things 2 or 3 years before PCs, but 19 years
to see it to. As a matter of fact, I'm supprised I had to scroll this far down to see it.
Dell is dropping the floppy as part of their standard configuration and they seem to be favoring USB flash dongles and CD-RWs. Gateway has started including a 6 in 1 (Sd/MMC, CF, SM, etc) card readers with one of their Laptop Models (The 400L). The new technologies will battle it out for the "Ubiquitous" title. I'm voting for the USB dongle since it seems to be the most univeral.
The point is that the only reason floppies are still around is that so many of us "old folk" are comfortable with them. There is better technology available! You can boot from CD, or even from USB dongles if you need to. (Maybe we could market a l33t h@x0r pw reset USB dongle...)
Let it go.. We let go of the 8-track (most of us any way), we let go of our Commodore 64s, our Apple IIs, the 5.25" Drive. It's time to let go of the venerable 3.5" and make room for new and better solutions.
If there's something that you can do with a floppy that you can't do with SD/MMC, CDR/RW, or a USB dongle, speak up, I'd love to hear it!
Dupe posts are
I hear about new printers coming with "lasers." Maybe these new printers can fill the niche between a free box to sell consumables and a robotic typewriter.
OpenBoot/OpenFirmware has had similar abilities for some time. Your CPU boots up a Forth interpreter, which then goes looking for programs to run. Expansion cards are one place to look, so that video and network adaptors can be used before the OS loads.
This is important, so pay close attention. The interpreter will run Forth code found on an expansion card. This means that you can use the same card in a computer whose CPU is from Intel, MIPS, Alpha, etc. The initial code will define Forth subroutines that allow the bootstrap loader to use the card. For example, a video card will define subroutines for CURSES-like functions, the boot loader will then call those routines to interact with the user. It's written in an interpreted language, so it'll be slow, but the OS won't have to use those routines, it will use drivers loaded from disk. On the other hand, the OS can use the Forth routines if it can't find a driver, allowing cards to be useful before you install the correct drivers.
It's a great idea whose time came over a decade ago. Too bad Intel and Phoenix never got on the bandwagon.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
i just don't trust bios functionality to data stored on a moving part. i might as well leave my computers perched precariously over a tank full of sharks, pirahnas, electric eels, and man-eating lions, and add a drop of my blood to the mix.
I also reply below your current threshold.
I'm typing this at an SGI 320 right now -- I've been using it for a few years now. Nice machine.
But there's touble with them thar gui proms -- if you use a USB mouse which isn't SGI's default one, well, you're f*cked. Which is too bad, since now if I have to make a change (fortunately I haven't had to in a couple years) I have to dig up that POS mouse just to use the prom. Fooey.
I'll take a keyboard navigable text-mode bios any day. Who cares if your fancy bios has 1280x1024 16 bit color with icons and scrollbars and all that hoo ha if IT DOESN'T REALLY WORK.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
"Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers, system backup and restore, will be natural EFI applications."
I can't say NO! enough times about the above 'feature'.
What happends when the disk crashes and you really need all those utilities? What happens when you format the disk and forget to create a special partition for the EFI? THIS IS WHAT SOLID STATE DRIVES ARE FOR!!! PUT ONE ON THE DAMN MOTHERBOARD! Really, do these people ever actually USE computers?
One of my friends used to have a Compaq desktop machine that required a special partition to be set up on the hard disk that contained BIOS extensions that allowed it to use disks over 8GB. Anyone can see how this was a pain in the ass when his hard disk crashed and we tried to put in a new one. I can't believe Intel is designing something that poses a similar ass-pain factor.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
As someone who has had to work with EFI let me just say how much I *HATE* it!
/boot filesystem needs to be FAT).
EFI is used by Intel Itanium/Itanium2 machines, and it's interactive mode resembles DOS!
Also for EFI applications such as their BRAINDEAD graphical config program you need to have a FAT filesystem to load it from.
In fact you cannot even start Linux on an Itanium box with EFI unless you have a FAT partition which then contains your Linux kernel and initrd (e.g. your
the 1st corvetts in the 50's also had mechanical fuel injection witch also had a strange V6 at the time and was never used again.
I have a 1976 datsun 280Z with bosch l-jetronic
EFI witch i think is the lowest form of bosch fuel injection it uses a flap to messure the incoming air and i still havent found the O2 sensor
I just want my start-up to give me the glowing red ball and say "Good Morning, Dave".
:)
My first instinct, on seeing the idea of a machine which won't boot into text mode was to cry "No Fair!" Then I realized that I haven't actually sat down and worked in a text console for years, and that the only thing I ever really "need" a text console for is diagnostics at boot time.
I still use text, but it's all via ssh in xterm (or equivalent) sessions.
Once upon a time, you could argue that text-mode was substantially faster, and worked on monitors that couldn't do the more exotic modes. With video cards today being FAR more powerful than the mainframes we used VT220's to connect to, and even sub-$100 monitors able to to 1024x768... it really doesn't matter much today.
So, over the last 20 years, I've let go of assembly language, I've let go of trying to optimize every byte of memory usage, I've let go of rewriting loops to optimize cpu caching, and now I've let go of text-mode. I wonder how long before I can let go of local storage (in favor of encrypted server storage)?
I'll be happy as long as they don't choose FORTH as their boot monitor language. Those sun consoles where just painful!
Wonder how long before we get soft mobos similar to softmodems or winmodems.
MS provides some of the func and you get a huge discount on the mobo, but it only works with XP200X and eats up the extra GHZ you paid intel for to replace the perfectly good, equally fast, totally "free as in liberty" and "illegal" computer you're using to read this.
Uggh. Progress?
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I also have an ASUS board with spoken BIOS notifications. Let me tell you, if there is anything worse than booting up and hearing a slightly different beep pattern, it's hearing a metallic, 2khz sampled, vaguely feminine voice scream out "SYSTEM FAIL CPU TEST SYSTEM FAIL CPU TEST" over and over and over again on your quadraphonic speaker system. I'm surprised my wife didn't have a heart attack.
However, I'm all for losing text mode startup(and all that other 20 year old legacy cruft). If anything, it'll be one less thing the Mac crowd can point and laugh about.
IBM's RS/6000 uses openfirmware.
I learned how to boot an RS/6000 from the network from the OFW ok> prompt by reading an Apple document, and it works the same way on a Sparc system.
--Joe
From the article (Not to conventional /. readers: You can get to it by clicking on the 'link' in the story at the top):
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk...
This is wrong in so very many ways. Ooops. My hard disk has just died. Oh well, I'll just plug in a new one, and restore from backup. Oh. I seem unable to boot at all. Umm. Help? Maybe booting from a CD would work, if the cd contains the EFI data, but the hard disk is just far too liable to suffer from corruption (I've had the MBR corrupt on the current one before now. That was a lot of fun...) to be used in this way. At leas if the OS fails you an usually recover it from an alternative boot medium.
If you're going to add complexity to the BIOS, I would like to see a total hardware abstraction as proposed by I2O. Plug in new network device, install drivers in BIOS Flash, (or in flash on the device, with just a pointer in the BIOS) and have the OS communicate with the device through a standed interface. Hardware vendors only have to write one driver for all OSes, OS developers have to write one driver for every device class. Less code = better tested code = cheaper code = more reliable code. Everyone is happy, except MS, since it's easy for 'alternate' OSes to get decent hardware support.
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"Because it gives a new level of control over the hardware, it's also of interest to digital rights management and security designers.
Call me paranoid, but I don't like it when things interest DRM people.
Also, since EFI has networking capability, wouldn't it be vulnerable to attacks?
"My Linux system is so secure! ohh damn..."
Free speech is getting expensive...
and you just KNOW it's going to replace all your bookmarks with links to pictures of cheese.
DRM or DRR: Digital Rights "Management" -- should really be called Digital Rights Removal. This is a quote from the article:
This "EFI" will need a partition on your drive... Also, as this is Slashdot, why didn't we here about LinuxBIOS ? It is not an Intel industry-domination wet dream, and it works today.Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
If you look at just about any Dell, HP or Sony system, you'll see that they are set by default to boot up with a graphic logo and no text.
This seems to me like Intel is trying to come up with a new name for something that we already have. A modern day BIOS can do everything they've said EFI can do.
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
See, stupidity is a choice. People can decide to look at the world around them, beyond what the TV feeds them. They can choose to read a book, *do* things, even surf the web for more than p0rn. Or they can choose to coexist with all of the other suffering sacks of human waste that thrive on ABC specials, lattes, cell phones, and the latest fashion trends; these people will do nothing for the world around them except consume, and consume, and consume until all the rich men can be no richer and the world can give no more.
And then we will put them all into California and blow it up, since it's mostly peopled with such idiocy anyway, and the rest of us with half a brain and a drive to grow, expand, and experience, will live much better than we do now. The world will be a better place. I wouldn't even get pissed when someone drives like a moron on the way to work in the morning, because I know it would be because of an honest mistake they might learn from, instead of being a chronic sign of the minivan-driving excuse for a human condition it is now.
YOU need to pull your head out of your ass for 3 seconds, blink a few times, and stare in amazement at the world around you. Then go do something productive with your time, learn, and grow, and then once you have taken your intellect to levels never before thought possible by your Mom (who was great last night, by the way), come back and comment on stupid people.
Could english have been this guy's second language? Of course. Could he have in all probabability been a moron? Sure thing! Do people who have put the time and effort into not being stupid, deserve the right to shit talk the ones who have not? YOU BETCHA. That's a privelage of being enlightened - we get to smack around those less motivated, because it's their own damn fault they are that way.
Idiot.
D-jetronic actually predates L-jet by a few years. D stands for druck, german for pressure. The pressure at the manifold is used to determine how much air is being taken in and determines how much fuel to deliver. Lots of other manufacturers used this method but Bosch decided it was better to actually measure how much air was flowing into the motor. That resulted in L (Luft=air) jetronic. Most cars made today measure air flow, but the flap+resistor has been dropped in favor of a heated platinum wire. Bosch also made a variant of L-jet that used a mass-air sensor (the platinum wire thing) called LH-Jetronic. You may not have an oxygen sensor, or it may be further down along the exhaust pipe.
"This will revolutionize your desktop!"
personlaly i think that BIOS's could have been replaced years ago, but there is still a need for them so there still there, and as for GUI, i think it doesnt matter, if it is graphical it should still do the same stuff. And unless operating systems are ready to take ove the job of the BIOS and do everything it does(which could be very easily done), or this new way will make it a heck of a lot more expensive to swap OS's. Either way the change is going to be hard. And if microsoft gets its way we will basically have Xboxes sitting on our desks, since microsoft has this technology already implemented in the Xbox
Heh, I got one of those on my motherboard too, and about all 5 of my friends (lol) bought the same exact board after I did. I think it's cool and you can turn it off if you don't want it. But I think the bigger point is BIOS should stick to what a Bios is: a BASIC input output system! BASIC! I would shoot Bill Gates if my BIOS ever froze up.
I know he has nothing to do with it and that wouldn't be his fault, but he has it coming =)
If EFI does a lot of device discovery and disk management, then theoretically Intel might be making it much easier for third party operating systems to proliferate.
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I dedicate this final post to the memory of all those who died trying to destroy the white devils.
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