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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."
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!)
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
How about USB keys? Hold more, faster, and can be used in virtually any PC built with USB support. They run on Linux, UNIX, MacOS 9.x and 10, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. Newer motherboards can even boot off of it. It will take some time, but if we can switch from VHS, then we can do this.
The floppy is dead, get over it.
OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) has a homepage. As does the IEEE working group. There's also a DMOZ/Google category.
I have that board... nixed the voice after only a day or two. It's very annoying (and really bad sound quality). And they did it wrong... it shouldn't say anything if the post went fine... it should only talk if there was a problem, saying what the problem was.
Oh, and one major beef I have with this board already: it doesn't have SMART monitoring for the harddrives!!! At least I haven't been able to find any sign of it and my email to tech support went ignored.
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!
dos dint use the bios for performance reasons at all it used it so that no matter what ibm compat. computer use used you were still able to use the hard drive, floppy ect. It dint matter what type of hard drive or controller. If your hardware linked to the bios you dint need to load a driver to use it at all. And btw, you still need the bios for when you first boot up the computer as it access the hard drive in order to load the OS
This document provides a brief, high level, overview of how ROLO (Rom'able Loader) boots a bzImage Linux kernel from ROM (or NOR FLash) memory, without the assistance of a system BIOS.
I remember reading about some people who were doing 3 second Linux-rom boots on PCs by replacing the BIOS ROM within the last couple years. I can't seem to find them via google, though...
It is an intriguing idea. Linux NetPCs are already done. I want a fast ROM boot.
(Bill Gates was not so smart to write one)
Billy boy didn't write the original DOS code, so it was not an issue of him "not being smart enough".
Those days it was done for performance.
No, the high performance calls skipped the bios. Back then the bios was mainly useful because many of the clones could be BIOS compatable with the PC thereby making getting a version of DOS to work properly on it was much easier. However, if you wanted performance, you'd call the
Another function of BIOS was (and still is) to give the chance to configure some hardware CMOS parameters.
Not back then. There were no cmos parameters back in the DOS days. Heck, pc's didn't even have battery backed clocks until much later. Hard disks were an expensive luxury and you had to run utility apps straight from the controller's ROM to do things like low level formatting.
if typing 'sudo nvram boot-command', you end up with something like "boot-command mac-boot", then you should use the command 'sudo nvram boot-args="-v"'
If you see "boot-command 0 bootr", then 'sudo nvram boot-command=0 bootr -v"' should work for you.
Regardless of what you want to call it, something has to handle the hardware until the OS can get enough information to intelligently start itself up. That means rudimentary disk I/O (int 13h), video I/O (int 10h), and so on.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
What was that last comment you just made? Sorry I missed it, but I was busy with this.
So we've taken what was once hardware jumper settings such as CPU voltage, moved them to BIOS config options, and now let's bypass that altogether allowing the OS itself to change these settings. That's just wonderful, I can't wait to read the report on W32.CrispyCPU.Trojan.
Slashdot: rejecting tech news in favor of rubber band guns since 1997.
Totally way off topic, but I'd wager the reason that people didn't go with Superdisks were: They sucked. They were slow to read/write regular floppies (some models, some were okay), they took up an IDE device (So systems came with 1 hard drive, 1 cdrom, 1 cdwrite, and 1 superdrive, no room for expansion), they were comparativly expensive. Originally they were installed on machines where the BIOS couldn't boot off them (So a regular floppy was needed, and this post suddenly became somewhat on topic, what do you know?) The media was more expensive then regular floppies. Wherever you went, you had a good chance of not having a Superdrive, you were just as likly to encounter a ZIP drive (or nothing. Superdisks could be put in a normal floppy drive, but couldn't be written to, causing confusion amongst the users. There may have been more reasons, but these are the ones that I think killed the Superdrive (and, to a large extent, the ZIP drive as well, replace the size problem with the click of death, and you've pretty much have it covered.)
Externals had a different set of problems, mostly being that of speed or cost. Speed being primarly Parallel port (slow) or SCSI (Fast and way to expensive/complicated for the average user), until USB, but by then, they were more convient alternatives (compact flash cards, broadband internet)
"And, just like replacing a line printer with an inkjet printer, it's a much slower, lower quality, harder to read, and more expensive way to do exactly the same thing."
It would be difficult to imagine a comment more totally wrong than this one. Line printers costed thousands of dollars, had crappy output, and were often the size of a refrigerator. Inkjets are tiny, often cost under $50, have far better print quality, and can print pretty color pictures.
I understand that some people find it soothing to say: "things were better in the good old days." But with printers, computers, and firmware? The point of view is so ludicrous that it hurts. Computers and printers have not been declining in capability (see the Moore's Law article).
There is no good reason to retain the BIOS. The BIOS is not and elegant, refined mechanism. It was a hack 20 years ago and now it's around for legacy reasons only.
I've seen a similar situation, except it was a factory screwup, where a bunch of motherboards shipped with BIOS password enabled and apparently garbled, as the usual "default passwords" didn't work. To add insult to injury, it was a cheapassed board where they'd saved half a cent by not putting any pins into the CMOS-password-clear and external battery jumpers (pins 2-3 of the latter usually works as complete-clear-CMOS). Had to figure out which were supposed to be the external battery pins (circuit was there, just no pins) and short across 'em with a screwdriver.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
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?