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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."

7 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. For the lazy... by avalys · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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    1. Re:For the lazy... by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Insightful
      they just want the current firmware standard to evolve to better meet the needs of today's technology.

      For values of "today's technology" equal to "Microsoft's latest DRM systems."

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  2. OpenFirmware by noselasd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why can't all the PC architecture vendors just get along and use OpenFirmware like most other sane architectures ?

    1. Re:OpenFirmware by AnwerB · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

    2. Re:OpenFirmware by oxygene2k2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

  3. Ugh. by bluephone · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Yes, I RTFA, and Jesus H. Christ on a stick, that's a worthless article. I'm sending the site an email, I want those 5 minutes of my life back. As any high school geek could have said, the article boils down to the BIOS is still limited to Real Mode 8086 emulation, and thus everything until an OS kicks in is limited to this as well, as hopefully 80% of /.ers know. Then, it goes on to say EFI solves this. Not how, no technical details, aside from you can boot from USB devices (as you can with some modern BIOSs) without emulating a disk device.

    Worthless article. I could have gotten that from the Intel EFI press releases put out FOUR YEARS AGO.

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  4. Re:It's DOS, not BIOS by anti-NAT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Who in their right minds is going to buy a new PC and put such an old OS on it?

    Corporates who need to upgrade to a new server for performance, yet can't afford to spend huge amounts of money upgrading the applications to suit the newer OSes.

    I'd be guessing you haven't worked in the large(ish) enterprise/corporate world. If you haven't, and haven't been exposed to custom applications, you probably aren't aware that hardware and the OSes to run the applications is a very, very minor cost when compared to the total costs of developing, deploying and supporting a custom application.

    The great advantage of the existing PC architecture has been the fact that if your applications weren't performing fast enough, you could just throw newer hardware at it. An over-the-weekend upgrade could result in dramatic performance increases. Compare that to having to port an application to a new architecture, test it, fix bugs, and if it the opportunity was taken to improve it at the time by changing the way it worked, running training courses for users and support staff, all of which may take six to twelve months or more.

    Continuing backward compatibility is probably the primary reason for the success of the PC architecture over the last twenty years.

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