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."

Comments

Hardware OS's ?

[vano2001]

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?)

Why not

[bofkentucky]

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?

Re:Why not

[Zapman]

Sun's boot proms have a fully functional forth interpreter in them. Thankfully it's rarely needed these days, but it's there for when it really hits the fan.

Heck, it's even possible to 'mount' a file system, and use a line editor to fix things (granted, it's easier to boot single user, and go from there, but again, if things are really FUBAR'ed...)

Uh Oh!

[FyRE666]

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...

Re:Uh Oh!

[MrDelSarto]

Though I realise you are being sarcastic, there is obviously some misunderstanding of how this works as evidenced by other posts in this thread.

EFI is firmware; from the moment you switch on your machine EFI is in control of it. You can quite optionally have EFI Applications that are stored on a non-volatile storage area (probably a hard disk) in a modified FAT partition. Seeing as you wanted to know, these are in Microsoft Portable Executable format, which is a form of COFF. But you can easily develop them under (ELF based) linux with gnu-efi. It's just like a normal C program, you can allocate memory etc etc. Elilo is the EFI boot loader and it works pretty much like lilo.

You can even have EFI drivers that extended EFI to do other cool things.

In essence, it's like having DOS built right in.

Re:Text mode start up screens

[Jucius Maximus]

"Text mode start up screen are cool! I don't need fancy graphics just so that my graphics card can get it's early morning POST exercise."

Who needs text OR graphics? My brother got a new Asus A7N8X Deluxe board for his birthday (along with a new Athlon XP and DDR RAM) and I was shocked to hear the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!

You'd hear in a sort of female type voice that the bootup was complete and the OS was loading. How about that for advanced boot?

Whither OpenFirmware?

[megaduck]

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.

Re:OpenFirmware pls

[spoon42]

To make a point, Open Firmware works nice *now*. I've seen firsthand the difference between OF on an old Mac G3 and a new G4; it took years to get things worked out. Hopefully Intel won't be cursing PC hackers with years of bugs, missing functionality (older OF versions couldn't boot CDs, or could but couldn't read ISO9660, etc.), and unintelligible DEFAULT CATCH and CLAIM FAILED messages.

Or they might get it right the first time. Or they might use something that already works. I'm not optimistic though.

Re:Text mode start up screens - Alien!

[FyRE666]

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...

From what I read, this is NOT the answer

[WhaDaYaKnow]

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.

Re:because

[Lee Cremeans]

Yes, OpenFirmware and OpenBoot are usually in ROM. I think the original poster was getting confused with the Apple "NewWorld" Mac OS ROM file, which is loaded by Open Firmware on the iMac, Blue and White G3 and newer. It contains the basic MacOS routines that used to be in ROM (along with a ELF loader stub, a small startup icon, and a short Forth program to unpack everything and start the stub).

-lee

Re:Text mode start up screens

[Ian Peon]

A Winblows PC I put together for my parents several years ago had a GUI BIOS screen. Detected the mouse, and showed a rudimentery windows style interface. "Not bad" I thought at the time...

This turned out to be BAD magic. See, my dad got into the BIOS by accident one day (they left lots of papers and other junk on the keyboard) and thought it was some kind of new Windows screen he hadn't seen before. Well, he knew he had to enter a password to get to the Internet, so he clicked that little "password" icon and entered a password... and that didn't work, so he did it again with a different password. He repeated that several times (not remembering the LAST password he typed), then gave up by selecting "quit". Computer rebooted and asked him for a password, which he didn't remember.

I was never able to get that board to boot again. Couldn't find the password recovery, it didn't have a jumper to clear the settings and pulling the battery for a day didn't help.

My opinion since then is that BIOS level setup screens SHOULD look scary to novice users!

Who are they kidding?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.