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BIOS Will Be Dead In Three Years
Stoobalou writes with news that MSI is planning a big shift towards UEFI (universal extensible firmware interface) at the end of 2010, possibly spelling the beginning of the end of the BIOS as we know it. "It's the one major part of the computer that's still reminiscent of the PC's primordial, text-based beginnings, but the familiarly clunky BIOS could soon be on its deathbed, according to MSI. The motherboard maker says it's now making a big shift towards point-and-click UEFI systems, and it's all going to kick off at the end of this year. Speaking to Thinq, a spokesperson for the company in Taiwan who wished to remain anonymous said, 'MSI will start to phase in UEFI starting from the end of this year, and we expect it will be widely adopted after three years.'"
Absolutely brilliant! Why didn't I think of it?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Am I the first to say that dumbing down low level config is a bad idea?
--
big idiot operating the system
With how extensible the new firmware is, I must wonder what sort of security holes we'll be seeing due to it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Bios sounds cooler and is easier to say. (Yoo-fee? Yoo-Figh? ooweef... damnit)
And whenever that clunky UI comes up, computer illiterate people go into a daze and stop asking so many questions.
I guess I'll start spending as much time with it as I can before it goes away... Start - Shutdown - Restart. F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12 F12
Very uninformative. It sounds like UEFI is a BIOS (basic input-output system), only it's mouse/graphics based rather than text based. What am I missing here?
Free Martian Whores!
I can't remember the last time I adjusted something in the BIOS so I don't care if it is GUI or not just so long as it is understandable and works. Seems like a waste of resources to me.
Other than the fact that there won't be any BIOS left, how does this affect most of us?
Is it likely to cause problems for Linux and BSD? Or is it just all going to be status quo but with an old piece of technology no longer present? Will the *AA's insist that the replacement allow them to lock down machines so we can only do what they approve of?
I really have no idea of the ramifications of the loss of BIOS.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As soon as I have a good-to-great experience with an MSI motherboard, this will be relevant to me.
They've been nothing but finicky to me.
Now, if ASUS, Intel or Gigabyte pick this up, or at least a few other mainstream manufacturers, let me know.
Macs went to EFI over four years ago. Hard to believe it took the windows machines this long to take the leap?
BIOS is the bane of the PC service tech. That's where manufacturers lock up the hardware and prevent you from being able to fix it or work on it. Good bye, and good riddance.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That screenshot lowers sperm count.
If they can't make it look nicer then I'll keep the old clunky, please.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You kids today with your GUI firmware. Spoiled rotten! That's what you are! WHEEZE.. Excuse me while I go get more of these tattoo's removed. Ouch, arthritis.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
EFI is the end of your OS controlling the hardware, the DRM-trolls will love it.
So, where can we find motherboards with OpenBIOS or Coreboot?
That is the worst reporting on EFI I've ever read. They spend half the article trying to make the false claim that the switch from BIOS to EFI has anything to do with its visual interface (I was using a pixel-and-mouse-based GUI BIOS 15 years ago and I was using a text-only EFI interface just a couple days ago). Then they end with a quote about how the biggest difference between BIOS and EFI is that EFI is written in C? How would that have any relevance? Maybe they were trying to say that EFI requires the execution of architecture-independent code (the EFI Bytecode)?
Sadly there was no mention of Open Firmware, either. Is there any reason Intel made their own Open Firmware knock-off beyond NIH syndrome?
AMI WinBIOS, circa 1995. I don't see the point of it Moving from a text-based interface to a gui isn't really going to make it friendlier if the user doesn't understand what any of the parameters mean.
n/t
GUI's are a pain in the ass for anyone who knows what they're doing. Anyone who doesn't know what they're doing should probably not be messing with low-level system configuration...
What is clunky about " text-based"?
I will take a clunky Apache "text-based" conf file over a gui with tabs, multiple layers, long lists of unsearchable graphic checkboxes and options any day.
Very uninformative. It sounds like UEFI is a BIOS (basic input-output system), only it's mouse/graphics based rather than text based. What am I missing here?
EFI, which is already used in Mac computers with Intel CPUs, doesn't implement the syscalls inherited from IBM PC BIOS. Things like Boot Camp add PC BIOS on top of EFI.
The PC BIOS started out as a simple nifty way to abstract away the underlying hardware from the operating system so that we didn't have to have drivers for every little thing.
Nowadays, we have drivers for every freaking little thing.
Why? The BIOS failed to evolve into the 32bit era.
It would be great if there could be a piece of flash memory on the motherboard which contains all the Basic I/O driver for each of it's peripherals... And for all expansion cards to have a bit of flash memory for their drivers.
Then the operating system (Windows/Linux/whatever...) can just use all the devices through their firmware driver.
(Fed up of drivers)
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Booting from >2TB partition. Well, and easier "hackintoshabulity" too, i guess.
UEFI is just a fancy name for BIOS - the program that runs on startup to test and configure all of the hardware so that software can talk to it.
AMI had a GUI BIOS back in the early 1990s.
I looked into EFI a bit (the technical details of GPT partition tables), and it just screams overengineering to me. GPT, specifically, bothers me because it allows partition records to have variable size and even to cross sector boundaries, which makes bootloaders way harder to implement (that was the context in which I did this resarch). Despite all this, there is an upper bound to the number of partitions you can have (512 I think), which is not the case in DOS tables.
Now, I don't know all that much about the rest of EFI, but I have gotten the impression that things are the same here. It contains a complete driver infrastructure, with drivers that are guaranteed to be broken and incomplete, and reimplements basically everything. And what is the point of all of this? Prettier boot screens.
It's not even the right way to go about it! That would be to load Linux in the simplest way possible (for which BIOS is enough) and show a pretty menu using all of the available software and libraries, and switch OS using kexec (or equivalent in other OSs). If I were to write such a program, I could boot CDs, netboot, do power management (pretty off button) and have pretty 3D graphics, and perhaps even use a library like GTK. Then, what would be the point of all the stuff going on in the EFI? DRY is right. Let that thing die.
Will I be able to change BIOS/UEFI settings using my bluetooth keyboard/mouse, or will I still have to plug in my old keyboard whenever I want to configure something?
...with an insanely complex load of crap (but it's "graphical" so it must be better).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Is it likely to cause problems for Linux and BSD?
Intel Macs already use EFI; therefore at least one BSD (Darwin) already supports it. Linux supports EFI too.
It's about time we drop the kludge that is BIOS. EFI is also required for Windows to be able to boot from GUID partition table drives which in turn are going to be needed to handle upcoming huge drives that exceed BIOS LBA limitations.
I for one will not miss the BIOS. It's about time commodity PCs catch up to standards that Apple has implemented way back in 2006 (all Intel Macs use EFI and GPT).
Since about when Win 2000 came out they have been saying we no longer need a bios and soon will not have one. But they keep making them. I had an off brand MB that had a graphical bios interface, used the mouse and icons. It was on an AMD K6 200mhz if I remember correctly, must have been 97-98. I remember it because the MB was junk and died in 2 weeks, brought it back for a name brand.
Back in the mid-90s one of the less popular BIOS companies released a GUI BIOS for select motherboards. It didn't exactly change the way the world worked, and I don't see any reason to suspect this one would have that ability either. Convincing people that low-level changes should require a mouse when it didn't before won't be easy...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sounds like a "tech pundit" who is more impressed with pretty graphics than functionality. He uses the opportunity to paint all "text-based" operations as crude and outdated, when in reality, most of the world's system administration (and certainly the most important and critical system administration) occurs on -- yes -- a text-based terminal. This certainly isn't because Google (for example) can't afford a pretty GUI, but rather because a pretty GUI has absolutely no business doing that kind of mission-critical work.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but to somebody in the business, the modern unix command line is anything but crude and clunky.
I think you mean PCs, we don't all use Windows you know.
As I understand it, virtually all ready-to-run desktop and laptop PCs sold in the United States that aren't Macs still come with Windows, not Linux. There is a difference between ready-to-run "PCs" and ready-to-run "Windows machines", as seen for example on Dell Ubuntu, but the difference is a rounding error compared to the total sales of ready-to-run PCs.
I seem to recall a similar prediction at least ten years ago. I'm still waiting... It would be nice to see it happen though. Modern OSs seem to bypass just about everything in BIOS anyway, although their still needs to be something to launch the OS. (I know- RTFA.)
The PC was never "primordial". It was an assemblage of mostly off-the-shelf components that was inferior to its competition but had the IBM label slapped on it. Immediately, it became the reference standard against which competitors benchmarked themselves in order to be able to advertise "100% PC Compatible", with the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator being the strongest test of compatibility. A reference standard is not "primordial". To the contrary, it took years to add the slightest bit of flexibility to this rigid standard -- e.g. defining the bus timings independent of the CPU clock in order to accommodate faster CPUs.
From the faq at uefi.org:
Q: Does UEFI completely replace a PC BIOS?
A: No. While UEFI uses a different interface for "boot services" and "runtime services", some platform firmware must perform the functions BIOS uses for system configuration (a.k.a. "Power On Self Test" or "POST") and Setup. UEFI does not specify how POST & Setup are implemented.
Somebody who has RTFA, please explain this. As I understand it, BIOS points to MBR, MBR loads Grub, Grub sees a small partition, loads kernel, kernel sees 2.5 TB system and says 'OHAI I CAN HAZ MOUNT PLZ?' . So how can a BIOS *not* boot a 2TB hard drive? Don't tell me it can't find the MBR - the MBR is just the first sector.
BIOS used to be basic. Initialize the memory, enumerate the PCI bus, find a boot device and hand off to the OS. Now that UEFI has come along, "BIOS" is megabytes of device drivers written by dozens of different groups, all trying to get access to core services, initialize their hardware, and publish their protocols so other drivers can talk to their hardware. If you thought a BIOS bug was a problem before, you ain't seen NOTHIN' yet! Oh yeah, did I mention that all of this stuff is single-threaded? Makes sense in a world where EVERY system has more than one core, but adding support for multiple execution threads was too much for the UEFI designers. :(
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
I don't want a Mac because I want an unencumbered, truly-free system.
I don't want their "technology" creeping into my PC, which runs nothing but Free and Open Source Software.
So you're not using your motherboard manufacturer's closed source BIOS but coreboot instead? Are you 100% sure that none of your devices use non-free kernel code either? Yes, the default Linux kernel contains non-free firmware.
I have my HP Probook 4710s for a year now,
and it has already an EFI Firmware.
... is how I read this. Probably the biggest wtf moment of my day.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
Any graphical parts are not important. What is important is the fact that we can now ditch some technology that we have been using for a long long time. Of course people will complain about legacy software and what not, but any software worth using can just be recompiled or edited to deal with modern technologies.
I know that there are a lot of nerds that will be very upset over the exit of the old standby BIOS, but for one, having been involved since the beginning of PCs, can not wait for this antique architecture to be updated. See I said updated, not eliminated. The existing BIOS system has changed little in design and form in 25+ years of PC work.
BIOS isn't broken don't have Intel SSD's, nor have they ever written code having to deal with ACPI.
I wish BIOS a flaming death, and the fact that this didn't happen a half decade ago is inexcusable. I blame Microsoft.
on this as much as i can. seeing it affect home users is okay, but im worried it might have impacts on
existing kvm systems i run. I really feel for anyone still running digi consoles. anyone know how this will jive with BMC over lan for BIOS type settings? i want a clear upgrade path and perhaps some backwards compatibility too.
given the outstanding concerns i think what msi is really trying to do is say, "we're making bios better!" in an attempt to boost
consumer confidence (dell/hp/etc..) and stock value for the time being.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If the hardware vendors got MS on board, they could change it and subsequently create some new machines with much better performance and the subsequent sales to go with it - it would bust the industry out of it's stagnation.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
One of the biggest differences that nobody seems to be mentioning is that EFI can be used to boot an OS installed on a GUID partitioned boot device without co-existing a standard BIOS bootable MBR and shadow partition table. This is currently becoming an issue as hard disks are becoming available with capacities in excess of 2TB which have sectors that cannot be accessed using BIOS facilities that only support a 32bit LBA (2^32 32bit integer capacity * 512 bytes per sector = 2TB limit).
Well, unsurprisingly, there are lots of snide remarks on Slashdot. But, they're mostly jibes at GUIs or GUI users. But, the real issues remain unanswered.
GUIs aside, the BIOS is a critical component in booting any IBM compatible system. Does EFI replace it with the same functionality or will EFI render all of the boot media and Windows OSes to date as unbootable?
If it is indeed just a GUI, then this is a non-issue. But, if it becomes impossible to boot Windows and DOS systems and media then it is a significant issue.
Just as it is presently impossible to boot OS X Snow Leopard on a BIOS based system(without EFI emulators), will it be impossible to boot XP on an MSI board?
Have fun not using your computer for fun but to make a point. I feel like exclusively using FOSS to make a point is like standing in line to get into a Soviet drug store to buy school supplies. The only brand is USSR and all of the products suck but there is no alternative because they are the alternative. You would stand in line and enjoy it, because you think that your sacrifice of quality and ability is really helping the people and it's the one thing in life you can whole onto as a prole.
I'm already dealing with UEFI systems with base configuration utilities that REQUIRE graphics and simply do not work with serial console redirection. I implore all serious vendors that will have to provide any interface via UEFI to support the text out methods. As any site familiar with Linux/Unix, or hell, even Windows Powershell/cmd users is aware, a GUI is not inherently superior to CLI just because it is shiny and there are many many scenarios where disdain for CLI is uncalled for.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Whugh. The plastic-fantastic design of the original iMacs is dead and gone, but you'd never guess by looking at that screenshot.
Looks like UEFI is pretty close to being a desktop OS.
Nullius in verba
EFI is also required for Windows to be able to boot from GUID partition table drives
I'm still uninformed on how UID partitions are an improvement.
How on earth is
5c4041ab-a4a3-4443-8c18-ae06fd44f0d4
better than /dev/sda1 ???
As far as I know, the major "feature" of UEFI over the original EFI is signed modules, ultimately allowing for control over what may be booted. The original EFI, while still bloated and overly complex (though considerably less so), would have been a clear improvement over the BIOS. However, the current incarnation of UEFI may be downright dangerous to our freedoms.
As bad as the BIOS is, at least we can run the OS of our choice. With UEFI, we still may--for now. Unfortunately, that "feature" may be removed in the future, just as Sony did with Linux on the PS3.
Or at least that is how I understand it. There was a lot of concern over this in the past, but strangely, I haven't seen much recently. I would love to be rid of the BIOS, but something like coreboot would be much better, as it would allow for a completely open platform, and is focused on actually booting the machine.
Am I the first to say that dumbing down low level config is a bad idea?
IMHO dumbing down the boot is a GOOD idea. There should be as little as possible between the raw hardware and the OS to tamper with the user's control of his system.
(Example of such tampering: Intel AMT - a built-in man-in-the-middle attack on the machine, sold to corporate IT departments as a FEATURE.)
But this stuff is not dumbing down (i.e. stripping down) the BIOS. It's adding MORE JUNK. Breaking the OLDER junk is incidental to doing a poor job adding the new crud (or deliberately suppressing the older functionality).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Take note! This means the end of your OS being in control of the hardware you buy. If you enjoy DRM being pile-driven down your throat then you will love EFI. http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2009/01/efi-hidden-threat-to-computing-freedom.html
Ok, now, it obviously wasn't at this same level as the screenshots I'm seeing in the article, but I remember my old Cyrix 586 100Mhz system running Windows 95 having a graphical mouse-based BIOS setup. Granted, it was a very old looking GUI that looked dated even in the mid-90's (it was almost reminiscent of GEM or some of the similar GUI's from the 80's), but I found it odd that the idea didn't catch on back then.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So, you're talking about Apple here, right?
Certainly your remarks make no sense if applied to free software. Free software OSes are available for a multitude of hardware, and free software users enjoy a variety of software choices. For kernels there's Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD; for system level stuff there's the GNU and BSD tools; for GUIs there are many options built around Gnome, KDE, and Xfce. For the stuff I use my computers for -- e-mail, web browsing, text editing and word processing, music creation and playback, image manipulation, and video playback -- I find many alternatives available.
I find freedom to be much more fun than its absence. If you don't, you have my pity.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
As a former BIOS option ROM developer, I have been looking forward to EFI taking over for years. I see a lot of misinformation in these threads. UEFI is more than a graphical BIOS. In fact, the typical system interface is the UEFI shell. The shell is great for system maintenance, and I've been waiting for years for people to start writing interesting utilities for the shell. As a coder, it is a much better environment than BIOS. Instead of interacting with a bunch of interrupts, there is an actual API that you can call. The life of a BIOS option ROM programmer is really a bunch of ugly hacks to get around system dependencies. The idea of UEFI is that the UEFI environment hides all of these behind an API, so it really becomes a "hardware OS". One cool thing is that UEFI based systems have a UEFI boot loader, so there's no more need for partition based boot loaders. The biggest adoption hurdle for years was solved by UEFI. Originally, EFI was owned by Intel, and OEMs didn't want to be beholden to Intel. Now that it is an open spec, they are happy to use it, and I hear that it is cheaper to license than a BIOS. Actually, many systems have been running UEFI for a while. We started seeing UEFI hit our labs about 5 years ago. They were running the CSM, which is a compatibility module - essentially a UEFI program that emulates an old fashioned system BIOS. However, they were still UEFI underneath. This includes several major OEMs. One other note, if I remember correctly, Windows actually supported EFI before Linux did (but HP-UX beat both of them). EFI was always the boot solution.for Itanium, and MS has supported it for years in the IA-64 build, it just took them a while to get around to putting it back in the x86 build.
First, EFI is not the same thing as GUI config utility.
EFI has been around since 1999, has been shipping as the default on many servers since 2003, and on many desktop boards since 2006. (Including every Intel-based Mac.) However, most also provide a "BIOS Compatibility Module" to support EFI-unaware OSes. (That's basically all Apple's "Boot Camp" is.) For example, every Intel Desktop Board made since 2007 has been EFI-based, with an EFI application doing the configuration utility in a way that looks like old fashioned "BIOS setup utilities". Many other manufacturers (notably Gigabyte) have also had EFI on all boards for some time.
On the other hand, GUI config utilities have also been around for a long time; I had multiple motherboards (both "major OEM" and boxed integrator-oriented boards,) in the early '90s with graphical setup utilities, based on good old fashioned BIOS. This is just talking about making a new more extensible graphical setup utility that happens to run on EFI instead of BIOS.
Stop confusing the two, stupid companies and news sites!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
DEAD MAN WALKING!
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
(and no, 64 bit Photoshop is not enough, let's get a 64 bit flash).
Lord, why? 64 bit is the size of the address space, so if you move it to 64 bit for comparability reasons, you give flash developers the chance to load flash files that are over 4 GB in size into your active memory.
And lord knows, they will.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have several systems running AMI WinBIOS. It was pseudo-graphical like dosshell and others, using hacks on VGA text mode. It did include mouse support, but only for PS/2 not serial or USB mice. You can google for screenshots, and I think it was easier for newbies to use than the weird keyboard controls found in most BIOSes these days.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Wow, computer systems which use EFI like the Mac will make OSx86 a whole lot easier! Neat!
I'm happy with any advancements in technology that improve the functionality of computers. Yay go team! But if I can't pronounce the acronym as a word I'm not interested.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"I find freedom to be much more fun than its absence. If you don't, you have my pity."
What a sanctimonious cunt.
I'm working with embedded (Power and ARM) hardware these days, and I especially like the way that this PowerPC (freescale) board of mine boots. You are immediately dropped to a shell, essentially. This shell is quite powerful (you can move memory, boot from a certain offset in memory, debug memory, tftp something to a place in memory, mount a usb device, etc) and then, when you're done deciding how you want to boot, you script that.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This seems to me like an excellent place for malware to root itself. AFAIK bios malware to date has been fairly crude, like bios itself. But this thing's "Extensible" by design and presumably has a great deal more storage to accommodate this extensibility. Sounds like bad news to me.
what a bunch of old women.
"Those kids want to change the BIOS. It was fine in my day, and it's fine for them!"
"I hear there going to break everything that ever worked."
"It's not even fun to say!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Making the BIOS settings accessible to more stupid people will not make computer maintenance easier. Anyone too dumb to figure out how to use BIOS as it exists now has no business being there in the first place.
I have several hundred IBM x3x50-M2 series machines in my data center and as of this generation they're all running UEFI. It's not about the GUI at all - most of the operations are still text-based move-with-arrow-key kind of operations. The point is that UEFI is supposed to present better forward compatibility with 64-bit and above systems.
One example is that BIOS bootstrap ROM address space is limited to ~64K of space to load device BIOS information. I have machines that are loaded with FC HBAs and additional NICs and if you put just ONE too many peripheral cards in a server it will experience the dreaded 1366 error and refuse to boot. This is because each card you install is taking from 2K to 16K of BIOS ROM address space for its own mapping. The only fix for machines like this are to either disable the card BIOS from the server BIOS configuration screen and allow the OS to pick it up post-boot or remove the card entirely.
UEFI on IBM machines is capable of mapping up to 2TB of address space (I think they're only equipped with 16MB of memory for this function however). You'll never run out of space for additional devices.
Pros to UEFI:
-No limit to peripherals.
-Ability to view and configure peripherals directly from the UEFI configuration screens rather than post-POST CTRL-key operations.
-Large code space enables some pretty esoteric functions to be performed if programmed for them.
-Handles 64-bit and above OSes and address spaces without resorting to cheap hacks.
-Potential for open-source UEFI code to customize machines.
Cons to UEFI:
-Godawful horrible slow boot process. Has to essentially boot a mini-computer in place of a hardwired BIOS and then "configure" it. Takes up to 5 minutes from a cold start to POST.
-GUI screens don't interact well with most KVM systems.
-Code is still very flaky even after over a year in the field.
-Maintaining a working UEFI environment will be hell on earth for the hardware developers as they'll have to not only customize each machine's UEFI but add all of the working "modules" to it.
If they can make UEFI smooth and fast (don't worry about a freaking GUI - just make it work) I see the potential in it. We are coming close to the limits that BIOS can handle without introducing more hacks (BIOS64?) and complications.
This probably isn't the most cogent thing I've written, but then again, I've got a machine in the back I need to go work on that's endlessly recycling on a UEFI boot screen... ;)
This reminds me of all the articles I read in the early-90s about the impending death of mainframe computers. Nearly 20 years later, they're still humming away with smug little smiles on thier 3270s.
Now that we will be integrating all sorts of bells and whistles, we could just boot from a cd...using a bootcd, and bypass the BIOS and this would then allow the computer to boot the HDD...or usb...just a thought.
From Itaniums to the x3650-m2, every system I use with EFI is extremely clunky to configure and slow to boot. It's a flashier more bloated version of BIOS. If it were faster I'd like it. As it is now, at best, it's an annoyance without adding any significant value over standard BIOS.
Apple has been using EFI in its intel based Macs since 2006. The EFI firmware allows the use of emulation modules so that, as an example, Mac EFI has a BIOS emulator allowing Macs to boot into Windows. On Macs the BIOS emulator is not perfect as there is no way you can actually edit or modify it without running the risk of bricking your machine after damaging the firmware, but there is an open source EFI interface for Macs called rEFIt that allows you to boot to a boot menu from where you can boot into Mac, Windows or Linux for example.
Amit Singh has written a book on prgramming the EFI interface on Macs which, for anyone considering getting into EFI programming is a good point to start with. Armed with a second hand Intel Mac Mini from ebay, you could get a head start by the time MSI release their motherboards.
I think you'll find that UEFI is not nearly as complex as BIOS. The big advantage that UEFI has is that somebody actually designed it. Unlike BIOS which just sort of evolved out of IBM's old firmware I/O libraries.
And you don't have to use the GUI if you don't want to. UEFI actually has a command line. I don't recall seeing one in BIOS...
I can't believe this is on /.
This is completely wrong!
BIOS Will not die, the UEFI Website itself says it.
"Q: Does UEFI completely replace a PC BIOS?
A: No. While UEFI uses a different interface for "boot services" and "runtime services", some platform firmware must perform the functions BIOS uses for system configuration (a.k.a. "Power On Self Test" or "POST") and Setup. UEFI does not specify how POST & Setup are implemented." -- From their website, if you don't believe me, http://www.uefi.org/about/
Please try to get your facts straight before posting.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
If you read your own wikipedia link, you'll see that Windows supported EFI 8 years ago. There wasn't mainstream support since most OEMs still used BIOS.
"Bring out your dead!" ...
"Here's one. Nine pence."
"I'm not dead!"
"What?"
"Nothing. Here's your nine pence."
"I'm not dead!"
"Here - he says he's not dead."
"Yes he is!"
"I'm not!"
"He isn't."
"Well, he will be soon. He's very ill."
"I'm getting better!"
"No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."
Hopefully the mobo manufacturers won't overlook this somewhat essential technology, which has not been updated in about 15 years... I have been enjoying the benefits of diskless booting a fresh os on 50+ machines for only about a year, I fear I cannot look back!
Not that I'd ever claim that the BIOS is wonderful either, but at least
everybody knows that the BIOS is just a bootloader, and doesn't try to
make it anything else.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/6884
"Hey here is a nice pic of WinBIOS I found."
AHHHHH!! Damnit, I had gone through years of therapy to get over my exposure to that. You've ruined it all!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Intel Macs all have EFI, that was the beginning of the end of BIOS, 4-5 years ago.
The wireless keyboard and mouse are another step. The Mac's Bluetooth keyboard and mouse stay paired even when the Mac OS is not running.
The next step towards the end of BIOS is 3TB disks, which BIOS cannot support.
A generic PC maker upgrading their technology is the end of the end, they pretty much have to have a gun to their heads to make any improvement at all.
Whilst initially targeted at high-end servers, Intel's long-term goal was to make Itanium the de facto standard 64-bit replacement for the aging x86 architecture in other markets. During the 2000s, however, AMD developed a 32-bit compatible 64-bit extension to x86 known as x86-64, later also adopted by Intel itself, which largely replaced 32-bit chips in most desktop and portable applications. Since high-end Itanium server implementations predominantly ran HP-UX as their operating system, this led to Microsoft announcing in April 2010 that it would not release any new versions of Windows on Itanium.[5] Chips based on x86-64 were also scaled up to powerful multi-core 8 to 12 core processors, allowing them to be used in high-end server applications, casting some doubt even on Itanium's future in this area
Quoth wikipedia
Including Linus.
But there isn't really anything good about BIOS.
BIOS only supports booting off a 2TB hard drive, an x86 processor in 8086 Real Mode and you have to have text display (BIOS INTs) working in case the code puts up a menu. Heck you'd better have VGA compatibility working in case it wants to draw graphics too!
This is a lot of limitations. It means no other processors (ARMs?). No booting in 64 or 32 bit natively. No booting off the net. And soon even hard drives will be too big for its ken.
Any capabilities beyond this are hacks and thus aren't standardized or even necessarily functional.
I know EFI is overdesigned for what it needs to offer. But it does work, and we need what it offers.
My next motherboard will have EFI. It better have backwards compatibility support too though.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
And give up 4 partitions? My 1978 "wanna be a geek" card. Preposterous!
Bite me
The pot calling the kettle black.
it would never seem to detect my mouseworks mouse. maybe you had to have the right kind of serial mouse.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If UEFI could be made smart enough to load a kernel and its starter data, maybe all the bloat it will be bringing could be worth it. Still, there is no reason for this bloat. All you need is a basic loader that can, in a friendly usable way, load an OS kernel ... the whole thing all at once, plus any data it needs. Add to that a firmware management tool, and you have all you need.
The associated partition table format supports 128 partitions. Who needs all that? Still, we can use that by simply putting these kernels with the data in a partition. Then the boot menu can simply let us pick the kernel to load based on which partition it's in. We could designated the first 4K of the partition to be an information page about the system to be loaded (name, version, build date, memory address to load into, start address, etc), followed by the actual image. It just sweeps up all those pages after the info page, into the designated location, and jumps to the start address (like any good boot loader). With kernel images in partitions, all the info is now easy, and there is plenty of space for several choices to be stored.
Let's not have bloat for the sake of bloat. Let's get something of value out of it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
BIOS supports basic input-output with the OS handling the complex interactions with hardware through device drivers. The idea behind UEFI is the drivers are built into the hardware's firmware and are OS agnostic. Basically you plug in a piece of hardware and the configuration for that hardware gets added to the CMOS setup. Then when the OS boots you don't need to install a driver as the API interface is already there.
At least that is the idea. You don't have a Window XP/Vista/7/Linux/BSD driver, you have the hardware and the OS subsystems talk to that standard driver. One of the things that stalled this on the Windows hardware side was though Vista was supposed to ship with UEFI supported, it did not. Many motherboard manufacturers were expecting to release this with Vista.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Syscalls don't have anything to do with BIOS or EFI. Syscalls are from the CPU, this is only one of 2 ways to get to ring 0 of the kernel, the other being Interrupts.
I apologize. I wasn't aware that syscalls on x86 had become something other than a specific use of software interrupts. For example, Linux used to use INT 80h as its syscall mechanism. So please allow me to reword my assertion: PC BIOS provides certain software interrupts for a real-mode bootloader to start, and EFI doesn't provide the same ones.
It's just a GUI. It will not replace the BIOS. This /. article is SOOOOO wrong. It will not replace BIOS, POST, or pre-boot configuration of an OS. Whoever wrote the /. article DIDN'T RTFA. Seriously. How hard is it to RTFA before you twist and regurgitate?
But it name should not be UEFI but GNU/UEFI!
Why? Because it should be licensed under GPL and it is developed by using GCC and Emacs! And of course Emacs, Bash and GlibC are more important to the user than the UEFI!!
http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2009/01/efi-hidden-threat-to-computing-freedom.htm
Another important thing to realize about EFI is that it also contemplates enabling chipset features that will trap certain OS operations to an EFI-based control system running in System Management Mode. In other words, under EFI, there is no guarantee that the OS owns the platform. Accesses to IDE I/O addresses, or certain memory addresses, can be trapped to EFI code and potentially examined and modified or aborted. Many see this as an effort to build a "DRM BIOS".
Typical of most large organizations, our systems get an OS installed through a text console and a network boot.
If we need to have an actual graphical interface to the LOM, things are going to get harder to install. Current x86 BIOSes suck for this (compared to what Sparc OBP has done for twenty #$*& YEARS!!!)
All I want is something to type on, which allows a WAN-boot OS install. Will this make it easier or harder?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I'm conflicted. Are we supporting Evolution today or Intelligent Design?
Are we going to add UEFI vs BIOS to vi vs emacs and God vs Darwin?
uEFI is universally slow as fuck....
The BIOS is the shittiest piece of a PC
The somewhat recursive Mini Loader on my DEC Alpha nettop from the 1990s was basically a small Linux kernel that got loaded straight out of flash ROM, provided block device and filesystem drivers, and provided a boot command line to select another kernel and initrd to boot for real. So you saw one kernel version boot quickly and dump to a command line and/or menu system, followed by another kernel warm booting after that. The advantage was that it could find the real kernel and initrd on any filesystem understood by the build of Linux used by MILO.
Whatever happened to OpenBoot? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware Forth-based firmware environment?
"UEFI". Doesn't quite roll off the tongue like "BIOS"
Still, when the second release is called UEFI Next Generation or "UEFING" it will make more sense. This rolls off the tongue in a phrase commonly directed at computers (UEFING sounds like "You f-ing...")
Old news, as I was using graphical BIOS'es at least five years ago with a mouse too that I could click on the cute but chunky icons to do setup. Can't remember if it was MSI or not could have been abit or tyan.... hard to remember.
FragHARD or don't frag at all
Not only graphical, but they finally got int 18h working!
You will always be stuck using second tier software for the most part. You can talk about kernels and distros and that's fine. You can talk about gcc and some other globally adopted tools that are free and old and powerful. Once you get past that level, however, almost every FOSS alternative sucks.
FOSS isn't inherently wrong but you will not get far using only FOSS products in the real world for a lot of things. Sure you could find an occupation right now to prove me wrong as an example which fits your argument, but if you want to look in general, FOSS hasn't produced things that can replace a lot of powerful, commercially driven tools.
Obvious examples: Photoshop (GIMP is not something that a designer would user. Designers use Photoshop because designers design, not navigate shitty interfaces)
Audio production (Audacity is useful for wave editing but it is not an audio production studio. Certain FOSS GarageBand wannabes exist but would not be used in a production environment.)
Flash is not replaced by Gnash. Gnash makes not having Flash bearable in some cases but that is it.
You don't need to pity me. I don't feel the need to define myself by the licensing of the software I use. Instead I choose to use software that works for me, FOSS or not and find much more interesting and worthwhile ways to define who I am.
"Mouse not found. Click left button to continue."