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Phoenix BIOSOS?
jhfry writes "In an interesting development by an unexpected source, Phoenix Technologies is releasing a Linux-based, virtualization-enabled, BIOS-based OS for computers. They implemented a full Linux distro right on the BIOS chips, and by using integrated virtualization technology, it 'allows PCs and laptops to hot-switch between the main operating system, such as Windows, and the HyperSpace environment.' So, essentially, they are 'trying to create a new market using the ideas of a fast-booting, safe platform that people can work in, but remain outside of Windows.'"
The Geek in me says: "awesome" The Hacker in me says: "jackpot"
So is this fundamentally different from Asus putting SplashTop on some of their netbooks and motherboards?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Imagine that, a mere 10 years after LinuxBIOS (now CoreBoot) first provided a full linux version on the BIOS (with near-instant booting into the OS of your choice), Phoenix gives us with this remarkable invention (complete with the standard idiotic fawning by Rob Enderle).
Bioii
Anybody want my mod points?
Lately BIOS has become the slowest process of booting.
I hope they won't increase bloat inside BIOS.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Cue jokes about chairs in 3..2..1....
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But if you look at the back of the clock, it always says "MADE IN CHINA."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This is why you first post as anon.
Now they should put parted and KVM in there and we can finally be done with the whole concept of dual-booting.
Hyperspace is an extremely fast booting (approx 4 seconds) Linux based mini OS. It is available in two flavors. On PCs without the Intel's VT extensions it is just a fast booting OS, but you can only dual boot it.
On PC's with VT, the bios loads a hypervisor which then boots both Hyperspace, and windows. (It may defer starting windows until hyperspace has loaded). The result is that within for seconds you can begin using the computer, doing things like browsing the web while windows. Once Windows is up, users can instantly switch back and forth.
In theory there should be little reason why other OS could not be used instead of windows, although the system may be installing special drivers in windows to help mitigate some issues.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Sure its a good thing. Thats the environment i'll boot into to fix the boot block of windows or linux, whenever they become unbootable. Hope it has room, for fsck, mkfs, a partitioner and most of the common filesystem types.
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
That said, I would rather have a read-only, default, fallback, usable OS in the system firmware. You know, something that could be used for:
The PC is one of the few platforms where the hardware is actually useless to the end user without an installed operating system. Reflashable BIOSes further compound the problem by allowing a software command to render the hardware unbootable and unrecoverable (that is, unless you happen to have a FLASH programmer and another computer lying around...). The PC has perhaps the worst architure and implementation of any major platform, and it's about time they did something to fix that.
In fact, with the falling prices of flash, why not just flash a Linux kernel into the BIOS?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Linux is significantly more complex than a normal BIOS and surely contains bugs. Patches will be needed on a regular basis, and the BIOS chip will need to be replaced several times per year.
Still, this ability to switch rapidly between operating systems may obsolete the need for a virtual Windows XP within Windows 7. Just install Windows 7 in parallel with Windows XP and let the BIOS switch back and forth as often as you need to do so.
Or this will shoot such issues down.
What about updating the kernel or compiling in new drivers? Do you have to flash the BIOS every time? Risky.
So, after searching around for the GPL'd components, I finally found a link in the FAQ to this page:
http://www.hyperspace.com/HyperSpace/OpenSourceRequest.aspx
Virtually? It's called a hypervisor. How do you think any VM works?
Why don't they just start to work on coreboot? The piece of code shipped currently as BIOS could be so much better. There is an excellent Google Talk about coreboot's improvements.
It's high time the old unflexible piece of crap BIOS died.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I'll forgive your lack of experience on this matter but I have to answer your implication that driver absence is a Linux problem.
There is a problem with manufacturers who decide to keep their hardware specs secret and so make it difficult to have device driver support under Linux. It is true. It is a lot less common, but still true.
But this is not a problem that is exclusive to Linux. There are many devices that are older and will never have support for WindowsXP or Vista or Windows 7. The devices are considered old and outdated by these same manufacturers and do not want people using them any longer and so they don't pay to have people write drivers for more current versions of Windows. It happens. This problem also happens with Mac OS X. Recently, I upgraded my wife's machine to OS X 10.5.x and her Canon scanner does not and will not have drivers for 10.5.x even though 10.4.x and prior are still supported. All I could get were weak apologies from support but there is no intention to change from their position. They recommended that I buy some software from a 3rd party that costs twice what the scanner costs today in stores. (It is pretty weak that they actually display the MacOSX compatible logo on the package and it is no longer completely true...)
My point is that when drivers are not open sourced and/or the hardware specs are not openly available, your hardware is limited by the willingness of the hardware maker to support it. This is true of Windows, Mac OSX and Linux alike. This is NOT a Linux problem. It is a Manufacturer-with-their-heads-up-their-asses problem.
He could boot your OS with a Swiss Army Knife, some duct tape and and old pop top, drawing the electricity needed from a box of old compasses. I guess he's retired from Phoenix by now, though...
The Admin and the Engineer
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think Coreboot supports using the onboard Linux OS even after you boot Windows or another OS while this does.
Even the absolute worst flash memory can be written hundreds of times without any issues.
At a reasonable update schedule of once a month, that would be no less than 10 years. You would almoste certainly be able to update once a week for 3-4 years. And this is worst case...I would be surprised if you would really even want to use the computer anymore (due to performance issues) by the time the flash wore out 15-20 years down the road.
We call that an IO error (Idiot Operator). Seriously.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Let the rest of the system - libraries, apps, configuration, etc... reside on the disk, but keep the hardware related parts (i.e. drivers, etc...) on the firmware itself.
That would work for drivers for the chipset, integrated peripherals, and devices that have a class driver (e.g. USB HID, USB storage, SATA storage, SATAPI optical storage). But where would drivers for plug-in PCIe and USB devices go?
Does this include Linux code in the BIOS itself, or only load it off disk and use it. If the former, did they publish the source?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... but an unlimited number of morons !!!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Stop sounding stupid.
I've tried this with people before, and it never works. Never fear - I have a plan!
sudo Stop sounding stupid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People will be able to distinguish between "my computer has crashed" and "Windows has crashed" because, when Windows dies, they will be able to hot-key to the still-running BIOS OS.
That's a very nice innovation. I look forward to buying a mobo which can do this.
A driver missing on an OS isn't the OS developers' fault, but it is their problem. There is a difference. They're not responsible for making the drivers, so its not their fault. Users still don't want to use an OS where they can't use their electronics, though, so it is a problem for the OS developers.
The solution to that problem may be intractable in some cases (a manufacturer refuses to divulge drivers under any circumstances, and no-one is willing to put in the effort to reverse engineer). However, Linux has done remarkably well, and things are only getting better driver-side.
But you're right its not a Linux-exclusive problem. My current printer doesn't work with my Mac, and older equipment may not work with newer versions of Windows.
You know nothing about computers or DOS. DOS didn't have virtual memory. DOS was not a BIOS-based OS; it passed a lot of calls to BIOS, but that can be done just fine, it's a little slower than direct access. Windows did the same, hence why it couldn't access more than 8 gigs of HDD on an old BIOS but when LBA32 showed up it magically could (i.e. Windows 98 first edition, on a non-LBA32 BIOS vs. LBA32 BIOS).
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I've tried this with people before, and it never works. Never fear - I have a plan!
sudo Stop sounding stupid.
beav007 is not in sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Parent should be modded 'informative' not 'funny'. What he says is true.
I have yet to discover a device in my house that just works when I plug it into my Microsoft Windows Vista computer (exceptions being USB mass storage devices).
This is in stark contrast to the fact that all devices in my house (scanners, printers, phones, cameras, etc) work straight away when plugged into my Linux machines (Ubuntu 9.04 and Suse 11.1).
It isn't coincidence, Linux has had better 'out-of-the-box' support for devices than Windows for quite a while now.
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
Let's just call this a gross oversimplification and be done with it, shall we?
Why bother having a separate OS when the kernel could fit on the firmware?
For security reasons. Your firmware OS might have exploitable privilege escalation bugs, so you don't want to run untrusted software under it directly, only in a protected virtual machine environment. That virtual machine environment must have its own OS, and that would be a disk-based OS which is easier (and safer) to update in the event that security holes are found. It's preferable if the whole boot environment is as near to possible as read-only, just to reduce the possibility of malicious exploit. It shouldn't even be possible to re-flash the system without physical intervention (such as changing a jumper).
With kernel drivers *in the hardware itself*, one would never have to worry about getting the correct driver, etc...
This is true for the flash-based OS and the built-in hardware, which is why you can boot into a usable system so long as enough of the hardware is integrated on the motherboard. Don't forget plug-in cards and external peripherals, though. There's no avoiding the need for those drivers, in general.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
How many FOSS drivers must I mention before you admit Linux does have a problem?
More specifically: how many FOSS drivers *which are not maintained in the kernel tree* must I list?
1. MTP008 temperature sensor was removed from 2.6 (was in 2.4).
2. Peracomm USB ethernet (stopped working while in kernel tree)
3. DIB0700 (and many, many other) based DVB cards - the manufacturer helped making the driver but it still (after over 3 years, in 8.10) is not up-to-date/maintained in the kernel tree.
4. Numerous Wifi cards some of which partially work and some not.
5. Webcams (gspca).
Need I go on?
6. EeePCs ... most came with Linux, most drivers still do not work even in 8.10.
Nobody claims this is exclusive to Linux, it is just a lot more pronounced in Linux.
My point is that even when drivers are FOSS and the manufacturer has willingness Linux *users* can and do have problems.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out why and who is to blame.
There are many devices that are older and will never have support for Windows XP or Vista or Windows 7. The devices are considered old and outdated...
In almost every case - they are old and outdated -
at least those devices produced for the home and SOHO markets.
I replaced a old HP printer with a wireless multifunction HP printer-scanner-fax with Vista drivers -
and by old I mean that only the parallel port worked with XP.
The new - refurbished - ink jet cost $99 with a one year HP warranty. It lacks only the color LCD for instant photo printing.
This is NOT a Linux problem. It is a Manufacturer-with-their-heads-up-their-asses problem.
There comes a time when the geek needs to let go. To pull the plug.
Open Source is not a panacea.
Someone still has to sit down and make the decision to write and test a new driver for a fast-fading piece of legacy hardware -
and if he says the hell with it, there is not much you can do.
Not really, all decent systems have two separate BIOS flash areas and will only update the second one after a successful startup from the primary. Heck some systems have that AND a minimal BIOS in ROM so they can always recover even if the flash is scambled (HP workstations and servers do this, stick a floppy in and hit a special key during powerup or flip a DIP and they will read the flash file from the floppy and write it to BIOS flash).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I have a mac and my peripherals all work great.
I also have a Mac, but it doesn't have any peripherals. Those are all attached to my Linux desktop machine. Which brings me to addressing the concern of the parent with his Canon scanner woes:
Why not try installing Sane (and xsane) to interface with the scanner?
Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.
Someone still has to sit down and make the decision to write and test a new driver for a fast-fading piece of legacy hardware
Not necessarily. That depends on whether or not it's a good use of his time.
Developer time is probably better spent supporting current devices with decent specifications, which are more likely to be useful for a long time.
The only times I've had driver issues with Linux were back in the mid-'90s on a no-name-brand motherboard (SiS chipset), and with a parallel-port Umax scanner. No-name hardware is probably always going to be problematic, but I don't think it's really the Linux developers' job to compensate for people being too mean to buy proper hardware, however often they get lucky.
This aside, I am continually amazed at how well most distributions support all kinds of devices out of the box, with no user intervention required at all. I can't say that for any Windows version I have tried.
It is currently accepted as obligatory to make references to Tony Stark being able to "boot your OS with a Swiss Army Knife..." in a cave. Tell MacGyver to get off your lawn.
even mass storage devices can be a pain these days in windows (u3 tools anyone?) and xp doesn't like multiple partitions on a usb stick (had to hack the drivers to make windows think it was a hard drive to be able to access the second partition, even though both partitions were fat32).
ummm that was my point.
Traditionally there is a BIOS which provides low level hardware access to a host OS which can then run a guest VM.
With Hyperspace the line between the BIOS and the host OS are blurred...
Does the guest Windows VM (it's running on a hypervisor) get low level access to the hardware?
If it does then gaming should work fine but it would be unlikely that multiple guests could be run simultaneously.
If the manufacturers will release the damn specs the geeks write the drivers for them and those drivers get included with every distribution by default.
While that is an interesting argument, there are a few fundamental problems that bother me:
a) The incentive of manufacturers to release said specifications is low. Regardless of money made on the acquisition of a wider user base (often through more hardware sales), such specifications create issues for intellectual property and often serve as an opportunity for any competing manufacturers to digest a well-prepared buffet of the inner workings of hardware and the software that supports it.
b) The incentive of said 'geek' to actually sit down and not only write but actively maintain said drivers is based on demand and free time. This leads to the parent post "now you see it, now you don't" support syndrome.
c) The incentive of a manufacturer to release quality specifications is next to non-existent. In many cases, only the most determined OSS master-mind is capable of both understanding what are often meant as 'internal use only' documents and actually creating a driver. While I have little doubt such people exist, there is only so much time, sweat, blood, and tears that many people are willing to give for results.
Note that I actively contribute to the open source community and use Linux on a regular basis. That said, I don't believe manufacturers are (entirely) to blame.
and if he says the hell with it, there is not much you can do.
Well , you can write it yourself.
Or better , find other people , who want the same driver , and cooperate to make the driver. This is how most of the drivers are made and improved.
Slipping shoelaces ?
There comes a time when the geek needs to let go. To pull the plug.
Which is why our landfills are filling up with e-waste faster than they should be. Great example of attitudes in a disposable society.
I'm all for progress and new technology, but why discard something because it just needs a new set of drivers? The reason why manufacturers can get away with this crap is because people don't get pissed off enough and light up their call enters with complaints.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The "Apple Tax" is more than worth it. OS X is virtually 100% secure, and its worth paying the cost difference to ensure my stuff is on my Mac and Time Machine drive, rather than being sold off to the highest bidder off a server in Tehran.
Bwahahaha
I had most of this in the 70s. It was called the Tandy Model I, and the entire OS was on a chip. There were never any driver problems because you couldn't install drivers. It was instant on (and by instant I mean faster than the CRT/TV it was connected to).
We've come so far .... :P
Oh, and 4K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody. ;)
Put identity in the browser.
2?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
OSS is a panacea for people that actually own the device and are geeks.
Or at least pee on it and create a wall of FUD. Their mighty and perfect OS usurped by lowly BIOS - and a BIOS running Linux. How totally non-elegant !
Its a great idea and I would actually have a reason - a real reason - to upgrade my hardware. But I can see M$ telling Dell - HP - etc. if you want to put Windows a BIOSOS system ... no OS discount for you !
However I would love to see the industry find a way to shove this down Balmers throat.
Its not the years, its the mileage
Typically they're old and outdated BECAUSE drivers aren't released, not the other way around. Webcams don't stop working; they just get forced into obsolescence.
What you don't know won't hurt you. 100% secure, let me know how that turns out for you.
I am the lawn!
No no, he said it's "virtually 100% secure", in the same way that I'm virtually a demi-god dwarf thief who destroys his foes by injecting flaming marshmallows up their ass.
which is totally what she said
Latest example is a webcam that I pulled out of my spare parts box for a project. Windows demanded the driver disk (which I didn't have) and couldn't find anything when I told it to go searching on the web. Ubuntu recognized it immediately and the driver was already on the system... instant joy. Gave up on Windows... another reason to delete Windows on my last remaining Windows computer.
I also hear lots of stories about WiFi not working but I have installed Linux on about 15 laptops (internal and external WiFi adapters) over the past few years and WiFi has "just worked" on all of them.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You think that the past has nothing to teach us? I suspect, my friend, that your life is going to be one bumpy ride.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
***Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.*** No, unfortunately, it doesn't. It supports some devices well, many after a fashion, and many not at all. The list of supported devices is here: http://www3.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html I use Linux almost exclusively because a decade of supporting Windows PCs left me with a deep and abiding disgust with that once promising OS gone sour. In my experience, most peripherals are fairly well supported under Linux although it takes the miracle of ndiswrapper (a wrapper around the Windows drivers) to use some wireless interfaces. Scanners are an exception I think. If the problems aren't too bad, being able to run in Linux and switch painlessly to Windows for rarely used peripherals and jobs like US income tax preparation that are iffy under Wine, could be a viable alternative for many of us.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
This brings up an important point. There is plenty of incentive for someone to write a web server, a database manager, an OS kernel or thousands of other generic bits of software. There is almost NO incentive for someone to write a driver for an obsolete device. The former can be a source of consulting and employment. The latter can actually work against you.
I mean, if a hardware manufacturer finds out you like to write device drivers for obsolete hardware, they're not going to be pleased. All those people keeping their old printers will prevent the manufacturer from profiting by making new ones. And if you really get creative by making the hardware do all sorts of new tricks it never did before, they're probably going to look for some excuse to get rid of you.
They want to sell new product, not keep the old stuff going. I know it's wrong to say this, but that's how the world's economy is configured right now.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
It's curious that the user with the 'no track pad support' problems never got back to the forum with the model name. From the screenshots it does seem to do what it says on the tin :) And according to the article HyperSpace taxes the processor and memory far less than does Windows, so why would that particular Acer be running hot ??
davecb5620@gmail.com
All your points touch the same subject: incentives. Thus there's only one problem: money. Not the loss of it, but the absence of profit. Truth is business is about relations, and hugging papa Microsoft tightly tends to help vendors getting their products out on the market. Microsoft has no interest in helping vendors that explicitly support their rivals. Call it FUD or whatever bullshit-internet-forum-made-up word you want but the bottom line is that MS, and its affiliates, have great impact on the IT world and if papa says no, then no it is.
I am the lawn!
Wrong.
1. You need to compile the module.
2. You need to recompile the module on every kernel (security) patch.
I gave you one particular product line on which the WiFi does not "just work" (EeePC).
I am happy to hear you have had no problems. I would be much, much more happier if I did not have any problems either.
I believe you (it works for me too, after several days of fixing), but they are not using *vanilla* Ubuntu (8.04LTS/8.10) so it does not work out-of-the-box.
8.04 cannot handle WPA2 properly (loses the key constantly). For both 701 and 900 you need either to compile the driver or use array.org.
Both are, IMHO, unacceptable solution for an average user and huge PITA even for experienced user (like me).
Daengbo mentioned above (vis a vis Tandy PC's from the '70's) that this is the way personal computers used to work.
Weren't the Macs and Ataris from the 1980's similar, utilizing a dedicated chip for the gui ("Apple toolbox")?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it does seem like everything old is "newer" again.
That point of view is all well and good if you don't aim to improve marketshare of your OS. If you want people to actually use your OS, then yes, it becomes your problem. You simply can't expect users to jump through hoops in order to be able to use your OS.
Most of these comments make me want to puke. I've worked on everything from OS and drive code to firmware/bios code. The one thing I've learned is that you _DONT_ want a heavyweight BIOS/firmware. There is a certain appeal to having a system which ships with a hypervisor, and a heavyweight BIOS that can do everything from configure your memory subsystem to allow remote web based console visualization. On the other hand, you have massively complicated and restricted your system. Everyone thinks that putting all this functionality on the motherboard is a good idea because you only have to flash your BIOS once in a while.
If you want an example of where a heavyweight BIOS leads to, you only have to look at the EFI or OpenFirmware specification. They are so full of technical holes and complexity that nothing works right, and in the case of EFI you have to update the drivers in the BIOS as often as you have to update them in your OS. So, instead of one driver you have two.. Plus flashing cards, or upgrading firmware drivers is _NEVER_ as easy as installing a new OS driver. There is always some technical or human factor that kicks you in the rear.
I've had this discussion with other people in the field, and basically aside from the zealots a lot of other people agree. The core concept of the PC BIOS is really close to the ultimate design. Of course its 25 years old, so its gained a lot of cruft and bugs, but if you were to start over the goal should be a modern version of the BIOS rather than some embedded OS, hypervisor, etc.
What you want is fairly lightweight bootstrap and POST utility to get the machine far enough along that you can fetch the hypervisor, or OS from the disk. This means you have to standardize the API for functions like read sector, print text on screen, read data from keyboard etc. You also have to provide the ability to extend or override those functions from a firmware blob sitting on a SAS adapter, or video card.
This is not an argument against service processors (an entirely separate topic, that people often get confused about), but rather an argument that I don't want my motherboard to try to standardize a hypervisor or OS. I want that decision left up to me. Generally the poor dumb customer doesn't want it either, they just want a machine that runs windows, linux, OSX or whatever, if they are even that detailed. The OS in the firmware people forget that firefox has been sending me weekly (daily?) patches lately, and its likely that over a few years timeframe the later versions of FF won't even run on some older firmware restricted OS without the original vendor providing upgrades. This puts the motherboard vendor in the position of being the support infrastructure for the _WHOLE_ computer. Something i'm sure the majority of them are unable to provide, even though they may have a couple people who can port corebios/linux/etc to run on their hardware.
a) A is a bogus concept. A specification amounts to an interface and really doesn't reveal much of anything about the internal workings of the hardware. With or without a specification you can bet a competitor with a multi-million dollar interest in how your hardware works will acquire that information anyway. So while selling hardware to the technically elite crowd that makes the major hardware purchase recommendations on big ticket accounts might not be a significant incentive to hardware manufacturers there really is no downside.
b) You could make that arguement except that there are no shortage of manufacturers that DO make their specs available and the result is that Linux has dramatically superior driver support for that hardware than any other operating system. Take a system with 10 year old hardware and load up ubuntu on it, everything will work out of the box. The popularity issue is self solving, if something isn't popular its because not many people use it or need it. If it was once popular but is no longer popular then the driver will have stabilized while it was.
c) I fail to see the motivation NOT to release quality specifications. Again specifications are how to communicate with the hardware, not how the hardware actually works. The only reason to misrepresent a spec is because the company is doing something shady like maladjusting drivers to give gains on gaming benchmarks at the expense of overall performance and so forth. If they really want to do this they can just release specs that say those maladjusted configurations are the optimal settings for the hardware. Problem solved. Otherwise, why wouldn't you want your hardware to perform as well as it could on a given system.
Actually since linux remains a tech heavy system, it seems to me that even hardware that is being under driven in software, perhaps to enable the sale of the same hardware at different price points would be best run at full unlocked specs in the linux driver anyway. This will give linux users a very favorable view of the hardware. While linux users may be a small percentage of the market, they are the geeks that make recommendations listened to by purchasing managers and by the early adopters who spend the real bucks.
If say, nvidia graphics cards give screaming performance on my linux box and ati cards suck and both have drivers... guess which cards I'm going to have a high opinion of and recommend to my clients?