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Writing an End to the Bio of BIOS?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the ami-phoenix-award-oh-my dept.

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."

6 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. OF? by ChristTrekker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why not just use Open Firmware?

    --

    Constitutionally Correct

    1. Re:OF? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful
      My guess is that OpenFirmware is seen as cryptic. The deal with current BIOSes is that you hold down DEL and up comes a nice, friendly, menu where you can configure anything in the BIOS you want.

      Whereas most people used to OpenFirmware know the default interface involves writing things like:

      1 1 + dup dup + dup + + base !

      ...and that's just to get it to give you numbers in decimal.

      Not that there aren't ways around this, obviously. For starters, there's no reason why DEL can't just bring up a GUI (or arrow-keys/ESC/Enter text interface), it doesn't have to bring up a command line. The point though is that OpenFirmware is seen as hard, it has a serious image problem.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. EFI sucks by SuperQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have several IA-64 systems at work. IA-64 requires EFI (part of the intel spec). It's a major pain in the ass.. you have to have a dos fat formated filesystem to store bootloaders, and other utilities as a primary partition.. besides the fact that they changed the normal dos partition format for EFI. I wish they would have just ported OpenBoot.

  3. What about AMD and Linux by cybermancer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I see Microsoft and Intel working together I think of the platform lock-in of WinTel. This makes me wonder if they plan to have secret hooks offering advantages to their products. It will of course only be a matter of time for the likes of AMD and Linux to get up to speed, but sometimes a little time is all it takes to improve a market advantage through unfair practices.

    --
    "Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
  4. Figures. by alecto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No mention at all in the article of what has to be one of the biggest reasons for the push to change the boot process: Digital Restrictions Management/Trusted Computing/Palladium/Next Generation Secure Computing Base. (Notice how the name gets changed every time it becomes obvious what it really is.)

  5. Re:Well if Microsoft's involved.... by gstevens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You guys are all forgetting one thing: Intel is involved, and they have a lot invested in Linux. There are millions of x86 boxes out there running Linux instead of Sun, IBM, HP, etc boxes running some flavor of Unix. Intel knows this, and they like it. They're not stupid...