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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.'"
traditional BIOS are an archaic nightmare really.
Most new technologies in them are work around hacks required to maintain some support for very old communication protocols (6GB SATA drives still have to support IDE mode why?) etc.
Give this a read:
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up
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.
Oblig:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI
It's more a strategy to remove 16-bit and other legacy restrictions from the firmware interface:
"The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. EFI is a much larger, more complex,[1][2]:4 replacement for the older BIOS firmware interface present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers."
*Still* negative function...
EFI has been around for about 15 years, but was an Itanium thing... UEFI was created about 5 years ago and adapted it for use with x86 and x64 computers. Apple has been using it since 2006 in all their Mac based PC's.
Unfortunately, OpenFirmware was withdrawn from the IEEE in 1998, so OpenFirmware isn't really a standard. And there wasn't really an Open Source implementation until 2006 (a year after UEFI was introduced).
So to say (paraphrasing) "Why didn't intel use OpenFirmware instead of creating their own?" is to ignore the face that OpenFirmware was a non-player at the time.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
HW Manufacturers will require EFI firmware to be signed in order to install it. See "executable verification" in this PDF
Read: http://kerneltrap.org/node/6884
Linus continued in a followup email, "don't get me wrong - the problem with EFI is that it actually superficially looks much better than the BIOS, but in practice it ends up being one of those things where it has few real advantages, and often just a lot of extra complexity because of the 'new and improved' interfaces that were largely defined by a committee." He went on, "so EFI has this cool shell, a loadable driver framework, and other nice features. Where 'nice' obviously means 'much more complex than the simple things they designed in the late seventies back when people were stupid and just wanted things to work'. Of course, it's somewhat questionable whether people have actually gotten smarter or stupider in the last 30 years. It's not enough time for evolution to have increased our brain capacity, but it certainly _is_ enough time for most people to no longer understand how hardware works any more." As for BIOS, Linus noted, "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."
Useless abstraction layers are useless.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.