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Why Intel Wants BIOS Dead

Posted by timothy on from the because-bios-stole-its-harley dept.

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."

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's DOS, not BIOS by jrumney · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Removing BIOS would break Windows 98, Novell Netware, OS/2. It would also break bootcode in older versions of Linux/NT/BSD/etc.

    Who in their right minds is going to buy a new PC and put such an old OS on it? If you need old versions of OS's around for testing, then keep a few old PCs to run them on. There is no point in keeping 16bit boot support around for hysterical raisons.

  2. Re:OpenFirmware by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd say OpenFirmware has fans because it's been doing most of what EFI promises to do 'real soon now' since the late '80s, and has been doing it as an IEEE standard for a decade.

    And of course, there's the fact that OpenFirmware is still the only firmware standard out there with it's own official theme song. Ha!

    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge