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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."
by giving it some other fancy name! U need to have something between hardware and the OS. Call it whatever you want to call
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!
Anandtech has a page about EFI as well. It also includes pictures of computers with EFI.
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.
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
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. :)
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.
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?
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
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
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?
By the way, ever seen the blank stare on an average computer user's face when you tell them "Oh, you can fix that in the BIOS, just hit the F2 key once you hear the POST beep, use the tab and +/- keys to navigate around and set the AGP aperature setting to 64MB, then hit F10 to Save and Exit." - yea, we can do better than this.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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?