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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.
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.
(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.
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.
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?