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Intro To Intel's Next-Gen BIOS Architecture
An anonymous reader writes "This article introduces the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is intended to provide an alternative to BIOS that will allow for faster booting, manageability, and additional features. According to the author, there has been rapid evolution of the personal computer platform since the 1980s. These advances have included order-of-magnitude increases in performance, ease-of-use, storage capacity, and connectivity. But there is one element of the PC that has not changed for the past 23 years -- namely, the BIOS (basic input/output system)."
EFI allows really big enhancements to the bootup procedures. Everything that happens from POST onwards in BIOS's today is a huge waste of time. (Especially on windows PCs, haha). All that time spend ennumarating ISA slots (what ISA slots?), floppy drives, hard drives, etc etc is a big time blowout.
One of the biggest steps in moving from that 1-2 minute bootup time on a PC is getting rid of the 10 or so seconds we spend letting the BIOS do its thing.
Why shouldn't you hit the "on" button and see the logon screen instantly? With more and more advances like EFI and solid state storage this might be closer than you think.
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RTFA -- it will emulate the PC BIOS (see figure 3).
Look at the diagram. The first stage is "Security." That's where DRM would go. Its purpose according to the diagram is to verify the next stages, which would be to eliminate boot viruses. Personally, I think you're paranoid. But hey, even paranoid people are right sometimes!
You can do DRM in a conventional BIOS (see IBM systems now shipping)
You can have a DRM-free EFI implementation (see Itanium systems now shipping)
DRM and EFI aren't directly related at all -- although they will both become mainstream at about the same point in time.
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Huh? Try reading the article. Backwards compatability is explicitly addressed; modules provide a legacy interface for OSes. Additionally, Intel is not going to lock out Linux (which they support) or any UNIX-like OS through EFI. Just read the article...
Presumably you mean locking out with something other than EFI, given that Linux supports EFI, as this ArsTechnical article notes ("Nevertheless, one thing is certain: Linux already runs on EFI boxen, so this isn't some evil ploy to kick Linux off of the PC.")
Since OpenFirmware is also totally programmable, does that mean that OF could emulate EFI?
It'd be interesting to see if future video cards decided to support EFI instead of x86-specific BIOS code. One of the big problems with getting video cards on the Mac is that they use x86 BIOS code which means that vendors need to make two versions, one PC and one OpenFirmware, and since the PC market is so much bigger the OpenFirmware version is usually 2-3x as expensive (and because of the development effort in making the OpenFirmware version, ATI et al do whatever they can to prevent people from just flashing the x86 version of the card with the OpenFirmware firmware).
It sure would be nice to not have to pay $200 for the Mac version of a $75 Radeon...
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OpenFirmware (defined in IEEE 1275 as updated in 1994) is no longer being maintained. It was withdrawn by the IEEE Standards Organization in, I belive, 1999. The rights to the document were sold to Global Engineering.
This does not mean that OpenFirmware is dead. On the contrary, there are several commercial implementations available. It does mean that it is no longer considered a "standard", though.
If you'd like some more information on OpenFirmware, you can visit the OpenBIOS web site.