Writing an End to the Bio of BIOS?

An anonymous reader writes "Intel and Microsoft are gearing up to move toward the first major overhaul of the innermost workings of the personal computer. The companies will begin promoting a technology specification called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) as a new system for starting up a PC's hardware before its operating system begins loading."

Comments

Re:OF?

[AKAImBatman]

because we're not all using mac's. hello. welcome to the real world.

Exactly. Because most of us are using UltraSparcs and other Unix machines that use OpenFirmware. Hello! McFly?!

Registration-free spec

[morcheeba]

The download page requires a fake name and email, but you can skip that and get the latest version (1.10-001) here. (Total karma whore link: EFI homepage)

The license isn't actually too bad - it just says that if you provide them feedback, then you also grant them the right to implement your idea.

Re:can interact with EFI on a serial console?

[ultrapenguin]

Most server machines support BIOS over serial port. And not your most expensive ones, either.
I have some low-end NEC servers, and the BIOS (by default) comes configured to check for a console on serial port, and appear there, instead of the primary monitor.

And this has been around for quite a while.

Re:Well if Microsoft's involved....

[Necron69]

Given the bias on Slashdot, I'm assuming most of you don't know that Linux already runs on Itanium boxes with EFI. All of HP's Itanium boxes have EFI on them, so it doesn't have anything to with banning the use of Linux.

- Necron69

Re:No progress for ANYBODY!!!!

[Wise Dragon]

It's already been designed, it already works with linux, and it's pretty neat. Right now you have to buy an Itanium machine to use it, though.

Re:Intel would never adopt OF

[Kymermosst]

With something like openfirmware, apparently you have to have a ROM big enough to contain valid code that can run on both IA-32 and IA-64 and PPC, etc., or you end up with things like PC-only and Mac-only cards...

Nope, plug-in drivers on Open Firmware compatible cards are written in FCODE, which is a Forth bytecode language.

Completely machine independent.

The article says that Open Firmware was considered, but they didn't want to drop ACPI.

Frankly, Open Firmware has a lot of features you are just never going to see on home machines/cheap server boxes as long as Intel and MS are in charge. I'd rather have OF on my server boxes, hence why I chose a Sun machine.