UEFI Formed to Replace BIOS

anonymous cow-herd writes "Businesswire reports that several leading technology companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell and HP and others have formed the Unified EFI Forum. The non-profit corporation will assume responsibility for the development and promotion of the EFI specification, a pre-boot interface originally developed by Intel that is intended to replace the aging PC BIOS."

Comments

Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[AKAImBatman]

I've said before, and I'll say it again: Why not OpenFirmware/OpenBoot?

Let's go through the list and see what EFI has compared to OpenFirmware, shall we?

1. EFI has a built-in bootloader. (Check)
2. EFI has built-in device drivers. (Check)
3. EFI has a shell environment. (Check, except that OpenFirmware isn't so laughable.)
4. EFI is cross platform. (Check)
5. EFI maintain *some* of the old PC BIOS calls. (No Support in OpenFirmware. Boo hoo.)
6. EFI adds trusted computing. (No Support in OpenFirmware. OF believes in computers being controlled by their owners.)

So why EFI and not OpenFirmware? Could it be a Not Invented Here Syndrome, or something more sinister? Is this the beginning of Trusted Computing for all? How do they expect to get customers to purchase an EFI system when a PC BIOS one is still well supported? Will they try to make an exclusive contract with Dell and invite the wrath of the justice department?

Only time will tell.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[oringo]

Well I didn't read the spec of EFI, but I took a look at openfirmware's website, and the first thing that I read was openfirmware is IEEE1275 standard, but is WITHDRAWN by IEEE. Could that be the reason of EFI, or the result? Another possible explanation is that microsoft wants more control of this, and they know they can get it because no standards like this can fly without them.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[garcia]

Is this the beginning of Trusted Computing for all? How do they expect to get customers to purchase an EFI system when a PC BIOS one is still well supported?

1) New Microsoft products will not boot on machines not installed with a DRM'd loader.

2) The "regular" Internet will not work with those people that aren't using trusted computing (i.e. online banking, music stores, etc).

3) People are buying new computers instead of cleaning off spyware because it's more cost effective.

4) Microsoft is now creating "anti-spyware" software (*cough* the recent Claria reports *cough*) so that people may end up going down the road listed in #3.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[Enigma_Man]

Your average customer hasn't ever even HEARD of a BIOS, so they don't know WTF it is. They just hear "three point too giga flops prints faster, faster internet, faster faster" from the sales droids. They don't care if it's Intel, AMD, Dell, Gateway, or a steaming pile of poo in a box, as long as they hear big numbers at the shop where they buy it. They don't know, don't care. Then when 90% of all "computer-users" have bought these trusted-computing Longhorn-lockdowns, there won't be any choices, even if everybody does realize "hey, I can't watch these pirated movies anymore" they'll be complacent sheep, because that's what they always do: look at viruses, spyware, etc. People don't know enough to be able to care.

-Jesse

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[oxygene2k2]

IEEE1275-1994 is withdrawn because no-one cared to pay money for someone at IEEE to rubber stamp a changed year number (so it could become IEEE1275-1999 and then -2004).

it's still in active use on every PPC device and every SPARC device, necessary extensions (new busses etc) are handled via supplementals.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[LurkerXXX]

So instead you will keep from joining their group the only folks who would be opposed to trusted computing?

They didn't join your group. Get over it. Staying pure in your group might make you feel good, but it's the group made of major manufacturers who will decide what's actually produced and out there for consumers to use. Not trying to join up with them and make the voice of reason present within that grou might be much much more unwise.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[jonadab]

> They just hear "three point too giga flops prints faster, faster
> internet, faster faster" from the sales droids.

I hate to break it to you, but it's not 1990 anymore, and the word "faster" no longer sells hardware except in server space (which is clearly not the market you're talking about), to a relative handful of gamers and powerusers, and to the extreme low-end of the knowledge curve (where the difference between terms such as "computer" and "internet" is still unclear and problems with NetZero can get blamed on the computer's memory, or possibly the monitor).

For the mainstream ordinary everyday end user (the kind of person who either knows how to copy and paste, or is aware that it is something they probably should learn how to do at some point) there are three possible reasons to buy a new computer at this point:
1. The old one is broken. This is probably the most common of the three.
2. The old one doesn't support new features that are wanted, such as
burning DVDs. PowerUsers will add components or install new software,
but end users in some cases will replace the system instead, especially
if the upgrade process might otherwise require a screwdriver.
3. The money is burning a hole in the wallet.

The third option also covers reasons that aren't any kind of reason at all, such as, "It looked cool on the store shelf" or "My cousin has that brand and really likes it".

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[Sique]

On the other hand, when everything actually running on the Trusted Plattform is going to cost money, and there is no free (as in beer) contend available (because of the licensing costs and requirements to get a Trusted Platform certificate), how interesting will it be to everyone? How often will they upgrade?
How many people have an Xbox or PS2 or GameCube or , and don't want an additional all purpose computer because the system they own completely satisfieds their needs?
It all boils down to the question: If we cut down on the number of providers (and DRM just cuts down the number of entities which offer something for you, being it legal or not), how long does it take until the system is no longer able to cope with demand (not necessarily in numbers, but in features, possibilities, additions)?
The IBM compatible PC was successful not necessarily because of the offerings of IBM and Microsoft, but because of the ease to create derivates and additional tools. PkZip and SideStep, Norton Utilities and all the hundreds of thousands little share- and freeware helper made it the versatile platform it is today. Introducing the trusted platform just cuts the roots to this flowering. How long will it grow if the soil gets thinner?
I give the Trusted Platform about 10 years, then something will grow up in parallel and replace the Trusted Platform step by step. It will be a sheer necessity, because the platform is moving too slow for the demand, laws and industry standards be damned.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[Mac Degger]

"Not Invented Here"-mentality?

Jesus...are you guys all this naive? Look at the first-poster's post and see the last item. The reason the mayor manufacturors want EFI over anything else is of course Trusted Computing. Anyone who thinks otherwise (especially considering OF has 11 years of getting the bugs out) is hopelessly naive.

And it's sad, not just because with DRM/TC that 'great firewall of China' can be implemented anywhere quite trivially and in a targetted way, or just because the little group with it's (admittedly better) OF doesn't have jack shit influence-wise, or just because if it did join EFI (even if EFI let it) it would be drowned out, but most of all because the first couple of posts at /. come out with some bogus 'well, maybe it's because of a NIH-mentality!'. Yeah; right.

I'm sorry this post is so vitriolic, but the fact is that here it is: DRM made for mass consumption. Only the geeks will know not to buy it, but it won't matter, because soon you won't be able to buy anything without a TC-EFI 'bios'. Or at least something up-to-date. For proof, just try and get a decent PCI(non-e) graphics card, and just look at what's happening to AGP.
And for the people who say 'it'll be hacked'....yeah, it will, but it won't do us much good; look at all the guys with chipped xbox's who don't do it for the pirated games, but for the otherwise never playable Japanese imports. Yeah, they can crack it, but they can't play 'Live'.

So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.

And for those who hope for capitalism and market forces to right this: forget it. PC-electronics is only feasable due to high mass-market penentration: geeks alone are too small a market for manufacturors to cost-effectively make EFI-less products when that's the standard. And even if they do manage (at largely inflated prices, too high for the average geek), you won't be able to use it on the EFI'd internet2.0.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[Lepaca Kliffoth]

I don't see any difference between mindless consumers who read slashdot and mindless consumers who don't...

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[Shaper_pmp]

This, unfortunately, is exactly right.

The problem is that now PCs are poised to explode into the home entertainment market as a general-purpose device, the overwhelming majority of the market is going to be Joe Sixpack, who's quite happy to buy DRM-encrusted shit because he doens't know any better.

For most of the history of the PC, people who've been buying PCs (or at least advising those who do) have been the more technically literate, so things like DRM would have a hard time gaining headspace.

With the PC's move from "expensive equipment" to "commodity entertainment device" the majority of the new buyers are much less technical than previously, so manufacturers can at last freely lobotomise their products for Big Business interests, and still be assured there's a huge market (in fact, the majority of the market) who'll be willing to buy them.

So, Joe Sixpack can't watch pirate movies (like he once vaguely heard of people doing), and can't back up his DVDs, but then he never could, so by his perceptions he doesn't really "lose" anything.

As for us hackers, techies, geeks and nerds, well, we're just going to have to get used to forswearing all mainstream-culture media, or living with an ass-full of MPAA/RIAA cock every time we turn on our machines.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[moonbender]

I think there's still some hope left for market forces. Sure, geeks aren't large enough a market. But people who want to play their "pirated" movies and music are a fairly large market - just look at the mp3 player boom - and chances are some manufacturers will cater to them. Most DVD players you can buy these days, especially those sold at Wal-Mart et al, are capable of playing back DivX. And as far as I know it's not difficult at all to find a DVD player that is either region-less out of the box or trivially easy to modify that way.

Re:Cue CmdrTaco's OpenBoot Troll

[greenrd]

Like Linus, I don't really see the problem with DRM per se. It's just a tool. Tools can be used for good or for evil. You'll still be able to watch movies on TV and at the cinema, and soon I expect someone will develop a cheap alternative to Windows based on a specific DRM-enabled binary Linux distro - to enable people to watch DRM stuff without having to shell out for Windows Vista.

What I'm slightly worried about is DRMed Word documents being output by default by MS Office 2010 or something - but I'm not too worried, because I think Microsoft will face huge legal, technological and PR problems if they decide to go down that route.

Apple

[Henriok]

So.. Is there really any doubt whether Apple will use EFI in their machines? Seriously.. they can't use BIOS now!

Who's doing what....?

[Rahga]

Intel,
Maker of overpriced, underperforming processors...

AMD,
Leading manufacturer of budget CPUs.....

Microsoft,
Singlehandedly proved that breaking antitrust law can be worth the hassle....

IBM,
Services provider de jour....

Dell
Master of manufacturing, jack of no other trades.

HP
Titanic 2000.

Wow, what a dream team.

Re:Who's doing what....?

[aardwolf64]

Those are the leaders of the PC market. Perhaps you were expecting someone like eMachines? Had you looked at the article, you would have seen even former industry giants such as AMI and Phoenix, former creators of BIOSes.

One thing UEFI will certainly do is...

[squoozer]

... make it about as hard as possible, if not impossible, to impliment a completely free open source operating system. I reckon that is all but guaranteed.

My bet wpuld be on some weird and wonderful, not very good, patented DRM technology that will be forced on it by one of the partners and cross licensed to the others for peanuts. Of course those won't be the licensing terms given to other people

Thinking of licensing terms I have another grumble but I think I'll spare you that one for now [walks off to grumble elsewhere]...

this wont kill Linux

[FudRucker]

there already is too much of a demand for Linux, either UEFI will accept Linux or some motherboard MFGer's will continue to produce mainboards with the old PC BIOS, i don't like the sound of UEFI and will probably go out of my way just to not purchase boards with it...

Re:Sceptical...

[Enigma_Man]

What is wrong with PC BIOS, a short list by me:

• Written in Assembly
• Not modularized
• Extremely craptistic source code
• Stuck with ancient ways of doing things
• At the mercy of the board manufacturer if you need features outside of what is provided
• etc, etc.

Believe me, I love assembly, and use it at any chance I get, but for something that is as complicated as a BIOS has become, it just isn't the right way to do it.

-Jesse

Ignorance is bliss....

[Manip]

I'm sorry but do you people take the time to read up before you complain? This is a wonderful opportunity for the open source movement. EFI makes booting multiple operating systems like a thousand times easier. Instead of having a single boot record on the hard disk boot information is stored in a data table and given as an option to the user who selections the OS they want.

This means that Linux can be installed without breaking the existing installations or screwing with the boot loader at all. The DRM is a problem but there is not too much information about if there is going to be a lot of DRM in this new bios replacement.

Re:Ignorance is bliss....

[wirerat1]

Who are you kidding? While you dismiss the DRM portion by consoling yourself with the notion that there might not be much of it because its not talked about in detail is ludicrious. Of course they aren't going to flail their arms about and go "LOOK HERE! WE ARE GOING TO TAKE YOUR ABILITY TO DO STUFF WITH YOUR PC AWAY!!!" Come on, get real. It will be mentioned as little as possible.

Todays BIOS

[BigDuke6_swe]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the BIOS of today backwards compatible with a lot of obsolete hardware that require the BIOS to still behave in a certain way? I belive there were hardware components that for example required that BIOS waited for a certain amount of time before processing some commands due to their startup time. And as years has passed by new features have been added while the old ones are kept and at some point it's a unnecesarily messy code.

You know the old saying.....

[mkw87]

If it ain't broke....

tear apart until it is.

Re:Sceptical...

[CyricZ]

What language would you put it in? The bios seems like the perfect application for assembly code. The problem is that the bios needs to be kept simple.

Forth, with the Forth virtual machine/interpreter written in assembly. This is the sort of application that Forth excels at.

Who does Apple need to convince?

[Rufosx]

Seriously, why would they need to join the group promoting EFI? Apple just has to decide to use it, put it in every Mac and that's it. There's not a bunch of motherboard and chipset makers to convince.

Re:You can simply circumvent it...

[garcia]

As with everytime I post a comment about DRM, someone has to come along and say, "but see, there's a way around it!" Wrong.

DRM'd OSs will not work if the hardware they run on isn't DRM'd as well. This initiative (along with others that may flurish if this doesn't work -- i.e. Phoenix BIOS) is to make certain that the hardware is protected as well so that people won't be able to easily circumvent the restrictions.

Why would they bother to go through all of this if it didn't matter?

I'm going fully Mac when the x86 powermacs come out anyway so Windows is just going to be something I use for emulation purposes.

An obvious troll but I'll respond anyway: Windows will not run in emulation because of DRM. Sure, they might get an emulation layer up and running but it certainly won't be able to do anything that you would be able to do w/the "appropriate" hardware/software... Software will be trusted. Trusted software will not run on emulation layers.

Sorry, welcome to the future.

Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that aims to remove the rubbish PC bios which is 20 years past it's used by date can't be anything other than a good thing.

And AMD / Intel / Dell / IBM make far too much money selling linux servers or chips that run OS OSes to try and curb that market.

Re:It's about time...

[SilverspurG]

Lack of documentation is the single biggest reason I have not yet invested the time to learn *nix

Say what?

Re:???

[vertinox]

So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.

Wait a minute... Isn't it us geeks who buy the "bright-shiny-new" hardware before everyone else does? Or maybe are people being duped into buying 256mb $500 video cards to do word processing (hell from my understanding perhaps they are).

So if no one is taking the "first buy" leap then what will happen? Will someone come along and fill in the gap?

You know.... This might make the internet just like the TV was in the 90's and we'll have to come up with another BBS type of system.

Re:Use a Mac

[phillymjs]

Yeah, but that's with that particular PC and laptop model. Abilities can vary wildly from one manufacturer and model to the next. Even if some PCs share the same BIOS features, they can still differ in the implementation.

It's the 21st century, and IMHO those features need to be standard across the board-- hell, until a few years ago I couldn't even count 100% on every PC I encountered in the field being able to boot from a CD, much less do any of the other stuff I mentioned in my previous post.

And like you said, having the right boot disk matters for you. For me, I can put a hosed Mac into target mode and connect it as an external drive to any Mac with a FireWire port, to attempt to repair it and/or retrieve data. With a PC you've still got to crack it open and recable at best, or take the whole drive out and put it in a new machine at worst. I've tried out BartPE and a couple other useful boot disks, but having to chase down all the components I need is a pain, and it's hard to make one that is truly universal when it comes to NIC drivers, etc (my company supports a *lot* of different machines).

Blowing the twenty year-old cruft out would be nice, like you said, but I still say the addition of useful features as a standard is what's needed the most.

~Philly

Re:The SGI Indy boot PROM monitor.

[labratuk]

The moral of the story is that, boot diagnostics are cool because you spend less time on the phone. I've never had such an experience with a PC, where if you're lucky you get a couple LEDs. I guess that's what you get for $30k.

Mmm. That would be nice, but you see the problem is that SGIs didn't generally have to cope with a lot of third party hardware. Everything that the firmware would ever communicate with was pretty much known before the box left the factory.

PCs have a huge amount of (often obscure) third party hardware available for them. What makes this even worse is that lots of the standards are often developed after the bios was shipped. How many motherboards do you have which were bought before SATA was widespread? Firewire? It ain't gonna be very clever when you add an SATA card.

In the past, BIOSes have coped with this by being fairly abstract to these things - as a consequence they're pretty dumb and don't have (m)any clever diagnostics.

Buy it's not so simple when you have a world where there are x hundred IDE chipsets, y hundred ethernet controllers, z thousand graphics chips and 100,000 UNKNOWN DEVICES.

Re:Use a Mac

[drewm1980]

Having your debugging be dependent on having a working display (so you can see said menu) is emphatically ~NOT an advantage. If the screen dies on your mac laptop, you can boot while holding 't' (stands for "target disk mode") to turn it into a firewire drive. Plug it into another mac, power up holding the 'option' key (stands for "option") and you can select to boot from the broken machine's drive. Copy your files over to the second machine or even just keep working like nothing happened until you can get your broken machine repaired. What will you do when the graphics break on your wintel laptop? Will retrieving your files be as easy as holding down a key and plugging it into another machine?

"Linux Supporters"

[overshoot]

Funny, cause Intel, AMD, HP, and DELL are all four linux supporters. Seems to me that Microsoft is the only one that is anti-linux.

All five would be more than happy to have "Linux" be redefined as a cryptographically-signed binary supported by a "responsible" company such as Novell or Red Hat.

The first four, because it suits their corporate customers. Debian, Gentoo, etc. just divert efforts away from supporting the two major distributions that Really Matter.

Microsoft, of course, because they know how to "deal with" corporate entities.

From Microsoft's point of view, F/OSS really is like terrorism. Honest. Like national armies, they know how to wage war against similar entites with known addresses, but have a hard time getting traction against amorphous movements which won't stay put for the ICBM treatment.

Re:Nail on the head right there...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also another problem from Microsoft's perspective: Trusted Computing that prevents "unauthorised" software from running breaks the "mostly backwards-compatible" guarantee that has helped MS maintain a virtual stranglehold on operating systems. One of the things that keeps people on Windows instead of migrating to the Mac, Linux, etc. is the fact that they can usually re-install their existing software and data on a new machine, and begin using it straight away. When they break this with things like XP Service pack 2, the result is that business users especially stay away in droves, and business users are very important to MS.

This does not of course mean that MS won't try and foist DRM onto everyone, but like some other unpopular things that they came up with (software rental, changing bulk business licensing terms for more complex and expensive ones, Clippy, etc.), it probably won't last because it will adversely affect their bottom line in a big way once the word gets around that you have to buy new software that won't work with some existing data.

And if DRM looks grim on the desktop, it's even more so on servers. There are a surpising number of Windows-based servers that run FOSS software such as Apache, Python, Perl, PHP, FOSS DBMS, etc., and few if any of these programs will end up being authorised. This means not only replacing the entire infrastructure for what are in some cases large and complex web systems, but also rewriting the whole lot to run under ASP.NET on SQL-Server. The sheer cost and time-scales involved would mean that replacing DRM-infested Wintel servers with Linux on a nice IBM PowerPC box that will run your existing web infrastructure without change would be cheaper and quicker by several orders of magnitude (IBM would not be silly enough to DRM-encumber servers that are specifically designed to run Linux).

With the above in mind, I believe that operating systems and software that require hardware DRM authorisation will be a short-lived phenomenon if they ever appear (which is by no means certain). IMO it's more likely that DRM will be used to progressively replace today's software code-signing, e.g. for certain types of embedded web applets, signed drivers that are guaranteed virus-free, and content that already carries intrusive and annoying DRM schemes.