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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."
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.
Anandtech has a page about EFI as well. It also includes pictures of computers with EFI.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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. :)
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.
OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) has a homepage. As does the IEEE working group. There's also a DMOZ/Google category.
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". ;)
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Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
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
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.
I tried to make sense of this sentence but my internal parser core dumped. Luckily my newly installed Phoenix Core Management Environment diagnosed the problem as a gramatically challenged sentence.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Does Phoenix will have (forced to?) have the paladium's required functions?
I see from this sentence that you're an avid follower of Douglas Adams' verb conjugations based on time travel. However, I believe that you should replace "will have" with "willen on-haven." That should make things much clearer for all of us.
kthxbye.
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.
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 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?
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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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That is exactly how will Palladium be implanted. You cannot graft palladium on top of the old IBM/Phoenix standard. You need to start from scratch and have a machine that is compliant from the moment the key is turned on.
In btw: nothing new here. This is the way all big Iron works. It starts enforcing licensing from firmware level so no way you can circumvent it.
So watch the words EFI. They are the words that will have to precede the words Palladium. Also do not even think about replacing the OS on such machine if the manufacturer has decided to disallow you to do so. And they very well can do this.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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'
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"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done."
-- Linus Torvalds
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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!
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
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?