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A Motherboard That Doesn't Require An OS
An anonymous reader submits a link to this review of "motherboard that allows access to your multimedia devices via a special BIOS. No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too.
Isn't an operating system a program that allows you to control your devices? This still does that, its just all contained in the ROM. Pretty neat, but still an OS. Surely not as bloated as MS media center. (note: I haven't actually tried media center, I'm just guessing)
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
The motherboard seems to be geared toward people wanted to create a multimedia center...I guess the real question is when does a collection of electronic parts become a computer and when is it a vcr, dvd, tivo, etc... :-)
Another layer of complexity! And for what? So the operating system you do install overrides it and uses its own routines to access the hardware.
BIOS = BASIC input output system.
Its just not meant to do more. Blurring the edges like this is just plain silly - a duplication of effort at best. Another thing to go wrong and more complexity where its not needed. Now we have bloatware in the HARDWARE too!!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Features in the bios seems a perfect application for the Linux Bios project, which puts the linux kernel on the bios flash. Could a minimalist Linux distribution be made to do similar features (TV cards, ethernet) while still fitting in the bios memory?
Phoenix is attempting to make a transition from a bios to a trusted startup environment. This means that it may be hard to install operating systems that are not signed by Phoenix... for money. Thus, windows, Redhat EL, and other commercial operating systems will continue to work fine. This may make custom Linux installs next to impossible - without modchips. (can anyone say xbox?)
So it supports various hardware in the BIOS rather than the OS. But unless it's got the rest of an OS on it, you're either putting some OS on top of it (which can be simpler than other OSes, but the fact is that those OSes have already been written and removing support would be more work) or you can write code on the bare metal.
I'd hate to give up all the things that an OS supports for me, but I suppose that many of them (memory management, processes, libraries, windowing, keyboard, filesystem) aren't necessary on an embedded system. As long as there's a cross-compiler for it and a way to get that stuff on, you may well be able to work with just the BIOS.
Oh, and I tried to RTFA, which would presumably answer my question, but it's slashdotted, so I'm really aiming my question at the embedded software developers out there.
Say it with me: OpenFirmware
The fact that PC makers keep reinventing the wheel is annoying.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Checkout MCA, it seems to do much of what you're asking for. Of course, nobody uses MCA these days - the parts are old, slow, and expensive,
I was using an OS'less motherboard in 1983. My Commodore 64 kicked butt!
Before having a universal driver in a BIOS on an add-in card would be useful, you would need specifications for interfacing with said universal driver so it could be used by the various OSes you mention.
Developing some sort of 'common driver api' can happen regardless of if the actual driver code lies on a BIOS or is loaded from an HD and give mostly the same results (you would just have to load the driver from a disk or the net).