Slashdot Mirror
Why Intel Wants BIOS Dead
An anonymous reader writes "This brief, readable whitepaper by Brian Richardson, a product manager at BIOS-vendor AMI, examines the history of BIOS firmware and explains why chipmaker Intel has invested much time and effort to create and promote a firmware framework to replace BIOS. Why would a chip company care about firmware? Read Richardson's paper about the 'Evolution of BIOS: EFI, the Framework, and beyond' to find out."
For those too lazy to read the article, it basically says Intel wants to drop the current-generation BIOS because it requires backward-compatibility. For instance, when designing the Itanium, they didn't want to have to make their fancy-schmancy 64-bit processor emulate a 16-bit 8mhz CPU simply for the sake of the BIOS.
Note that, despite the hyperbolized title of the Slashdot summary, Intel doesn't want the BIOS dead. They don't have any problem with the concept of a BIOS, they just want the current firmware standard to evolve to better meet the needs of today's technology.
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Why can't all the PC architecture vendors just get along and use OpenFirmware like most other sane architectures ?
For some reason, while I read this my first thought was "Franklin".
Vendors like Dell see the BIOS as a necessary evil. They pay BIOS developers big bucks to keep updating the BIOS for new motherboards. Occasionally, a new feature creeps in like USB keyboard or bootable CD support. To rip out all that legacy code (which no one has touched 15 years) would be a development and testing nightmare.
Of course, switching to Open Firmware would make more sense, but we'll never see that happen.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Make SCO sue me, if Mictosoft won't "help out" with the new firmware! ...And while they are at it, a DRM is implanted=(
Worthless article. I could have gotten that from the Intel EFI press releases put out FOUR YEARS AGO.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I'm puzzled. Yes you need to be able to emulate INT 10H but in real terms that's a *high* level interface. (may be a shock to virginal C++ programmers I guess). When I first started programming (and that was in the early 80's) most machines weren't anything like anyone elses machines. I was porting the UCSD p-system - a system based on an interpreted Pascal (Borland's Pascal up to 5.x is very similar). UCSD Pascal is best thought of as an early attempt at the Sun/Java "write once execute everywhere" philosophy. It didn't work out (sadly). But pre "PC's" no machine was even remotely similar to another machine. Developers couldn't target anything or earn enough. I always call this the "Pre-Cambrian explosion" because the machines and environments were so weird that only a drug fiend could have invented them. To cut a long story short - all the bios (sic) needs to do is load sector zero off the winchester (big grin for newbies) and let rip. Real programmers can cut their own debug code. (Now being a slower forty something I shudder when I think about it, but it was fun at the time). It would still be a good exercise to drop someone expecting an IDE into such an environment for evaluation. Never mind "bastard operator from hell", some of you gals/guys come up with "bastard sys programmer from hell".
The x86 has a lot of garbage that the OS doesn't use it frequently. It was suboptimized using the older and worse technology since 1980.
I should go to use Alpha systems, but it's dead, it was assassined by Intel Corp.
Mea culpa.
> Who in their right minds is going to buy a new PC and put such an old OS on it?
To run DOS games, of course! How else will you be able to run such great oldies like Civilization, Dark Sun, or even Leisure Suit Larry. Then there is Space Quest, Mega Traveller II, Life and Death, and many other titles, which simply do not exist on any other platform. Windows games these days are mostly of the 3D FPS kind and are rather boring. Linux has no games at all, except for those that can run in an emulator (if you can get the emulator to run, that is). So what's a gamer to do? Run DOS, of course!
Long time passing,
Where have all the pixels gone,
long time ago.
Where have all the pixels gone,
They've gone to Apple, every one,
When will we ever learn,
When will we ever learn.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Text mode is higher resolution then 320x240. But if your BIOS shows some graphic during POST, it won't be any better even with a completely new BIOS type unless all the graphics card makers also agree upon a standard interface for high color, high resolution graphics on boot.
Most modern BIOS's boot very quickly. With a "normal" workstation setup with a single IDE hard disk and a CD-ROM drive, it often takes under three seconds before it starts to read the OS from the hard disk.
A new BIOS firmware won't help much in either of those cases. And if you have SCSI controllers and all that jazz, it will take just as long as before to detect all the drives.
I'm not saying that improving the BIOS isn't something that doesn't need to be done, but none of the features you mentioned will be improved.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Will you please stop with the narrow column shit? It's fucking annoying.
To clear up confusion:
SGI made two batches of PCs. Their first batch, the Visual Workstation 320 and 540 were dual and quad Xeons based on the architecture of their (MIPS/IRIX) O2 workstation. The 320/540 didn't have a traditional BIOS as you pointed out, instead it had an ARCS loader and a PROM, like their MIPS/IRIX workstations. To the end user, this meant a pretty boot screen with an option to go into an equally pretty pointy-clicky GUI "Settings" mode.
Because of this, the 320 and 540 worked best with NT 4.0. Support was later released for Win2K, but it was never 100% fully supported. XP has never and will never work on the 320/540, the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was never written. A Linux port was demoed but never released. Back in the days of NT, the 320/540 were by far the nicest PCs to work with, especially with the onboard video I/O and uber cool SGI 1600sw flat panel that had a direct LVDS (pre-DVI, *sigh*) connection to the graphics.
The 320/540 were very late to market (= oldschool OpenGL performance) and were never really accepted by traditional PC users. SGI later released a series of generic PCs and even eventually bought Intergraph's Zx10 product line. All of these ventures were huge failures for SGI. (But then, what venture hasn't?)
What's the big deal. I was porting OS's back in the
early 80's and if by "BIOS" you mean that miserable
piece of shit that lives in ROM it was mostly only
capable of loading sector zero of the "whinnie"
(which is exactly what we did when it didn't).
(translation for newtimers: Winchester = hard disk.
"whinnie or winnie = hard disk right?).
So, why in name would you stick this thing in a ROM? It could have always lived and been loaded off the friggin disk. Do it that way and you get the
benefit of being able to update things for the future. Better still, you don't have *any* nightmares of that pesky little scuzzball Yannis Questidis hosing the flash...
Yes, he might be able to touch the HD, but any sensible OS implementor *knows* how to track that.
Hmm.
In any case what most of you PC "children" think of as a BIOS is really a truly sucky monitor program. Gosh TIM on a CBM Pet was almost as
good. Oh god. I want to go back and port UCSD again... or even CP/M - 68k...
But, I'm going to calm down now. My doctor says I must consider the effect on my health.
Aw peddle your half truths and outright lies somewhere else. Everybody knows that DRM is the issue and is the sole reason to do away with bioses. This is why the Apple III was conceived by Steve Jobs back in the eighties. Jobs wanted to control the destiny of the 'III'. He was effective! The 'III' was so expensive, so slow, and so bad that it never sold enough units even to make it to yard sales. This should be the fate of DRM. DONT BUY IT!! I just bought a laptop that turns out has 'XP' on it. Guess what, Microsoft conspired with the French company, Averatec, to put a custonixed version of an imbedded S3 processor inside of a VIA chipset. They did this so that drivers made for win2k operating systems would not work. Then they instructed their customer support people to feign ignorance when questioned about this. Their 'license' for this states that 'XP' would be the only one that uses would be allowed to use on the WalMart marketed Averatec 5400. .dll in every XP system that operates in conjunction with a 'black hole' list that those machines download quietly at every opportunity. The first softwares to be blacklisted were all competitors to ole Gatesees'
Got news for them. Got SuSE 9.1 to run on it....and even network. The whole bundled software package on the WalMart/Averatec5400 is full of DRM and DRM RELATED 'UPGRADES' TO BE DELIVERED TO THE USER WITHOUT HIS PERMISSION OF EVEN ACTIVE KNOWLEDGE. Now I find out that Microsoft can kill my software romotely by the clever use of a
own XP firewall. Would'nt want to close those backdoors now would one.
DRM is not inevitable. DRM is RAPE of the computer consumer. We should just not buy it!
Governments don't. They know what evils can lurk in secret computer code. There is one worthy in an Iraqi jail that rues the day his regime ever bought American software from Bill Gates's minions. That is the impetus behind the recent quasi willingness by micro$$$$ to 'open up' some code for view.....but only in the 'Office' suite.
Now lets get down to business and 'DIVx'-ize
windows.
How did God create world in 7 days, He had no installed user base to consider.