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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 ?
There is absolutely no market pressure whatsoever to do so.
As long as there is either influence or money to be made on BIOS, and no pressure to move to an open standard, then none of big players will move in that direction.
I realize that what I just said was obvious, but no one has said it yet (at the time of this writing).
Back when SGI had their brief love affair with Microsoft, they produced workstations called VisualWS or something. They needed a custom copy of Windows NT, because they didn't have the usual real-mode boot or the DOS-mandated memory layout. This is from memory and I never actually touched one, so I could be wrong of course.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The technical reasons are (A) backward-compatibility for older OSes and (B) easier migration path for newer OSes. And of course some NIH factor.
OpenFirmware apparently has some fans because Apple and Sun use it. But OF is just a means to an end, and EFI accomplishes the same objectives. The best thing for Apple/Sun customers would be if they adopted EFI and became truely compatible with Intel hardware standards, fulfilling the promise made when they adopted PCI/AGP.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Not just DOS! Removing BIOS would break Windows 98, Novell Netware, OS/2. It would also break bootcode in older versions of Linux/NT/BSD/etc. (And even if it was just DOS, may corps still use it to "Ghost" every new machine that comes in the door.)
Believe or not, millions of customers still use this stuff. Killing back-compat would be a sales disaster. It's not like Apple where they can force customers to run OS x.y.z (released yesterday).
On another level, there's the psychological factor. All the hardware vendors made their mark by being "100% IBM PC AT Compatible", and it's somewhat admirable they haven't given it up yet.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
You mean like Itanium? One of features of EFI is CPU-independant bytecode, like OF.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
OpenFirmware is standard of 300 pages.. EFI is 3000 pages, I think..
also, intel claims that it took them "hundreds of man years" to do EFI, while it took a friend of mine and me (basically) the spare time of about 1.5 years to implement most of OF.
see http://www.openbios.org/. (and yes, we're to busy to update the website)