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Phoenix's BIOS Roadmap

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the whole-lotta-acronyms dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Phoenix Technologies Ltd. unveiled a vision and roadmap for a next generation of system BIOS firmware that the company calls "core system software" today, at its Strategy 2004 conference. As defined by Phoenix, CSS is a new category of core system firmware that transcends the boundaries of traditional BIOSes and to deliver "extensible firmware that provides the critical foundation of trust, manageability, and connectivity required for networked computing," in a broad range of devices including desktop and laptop PCs, servers, and handhelds gadgets. Specific technologies that Phoenix is integrating into its d-NA CSS firmware include: support for the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) specification, remote diagnostics and error-checking, intelligent configuration checking and integrated system policy management, automated provisioning of servers and server virtualization, "radically enhanced" device power management, embedded TCP/IP, remote management functions including dynamic provisioning, load balancing and software resource control, and an XML and SOAP standards-based interface to CSS functions."

3 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Too much by Dun+Malg · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Cripes, how much crap are they going to shoehorn in there at the mostly-unused hardware configuration level? Will it come with a calculator app and Minesweeper too?

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    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  2. So, what they've done is... by jd · · Score: 0, Redundant
    ...loaded Linux plus security patches into the BIOS, using the LinuxBIOS code, and tagged on some Win32 code to make it runnable under Windows, then sold it as a new idea.


    If they've written it from scratch, they're fools and I wouldn't want to buy it. If they've used existing tools, most are Open Source and I'd want to know about license violations.


    Either which way, any competent coder could throw a basic kernel image into a BIOS chip and write drivers that talk with it. This isn't new, this certainly isn't original, and I'm not even convinced it's useful. (Flash RAM is usually fairly slow, so it's not much use beyond boot-time for most modern OS'.)

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Hmmmm. by Dun+Malg · · Score: 1, Redundant

    If they put in the capability of BIOS flashing over TCP/IP, we may see our first OS-agnostic x86 virus. Would that be nasty, or what.

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    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.