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BIOS' Days Are Numbered

Posted by timothy on from the all-days-are-numbered dept.

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."

2 of 502 comments (clear)

  1. OpenFirmware pls by jpt.d · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  2. Re:Gets rid of text-mode startup? by gwernol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Of course there is absolutely no reason why a graphical startup can't (perhaps optionally) display all the usual POST test messages. A good example of this is Mac OS X: by default you don't see the Open Firmware messages during startup but you can turn them on and get all the information you would expect.

    If you're not [a geek], 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...

    Some text-mode BIOSes already do this. The issue is not text vs. graphics, its what features and options does your particular EFI or BIOS vendor give you.

    --
    Sailing over the event horizon