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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.'"
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!
They'll do the same with EFI.
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)
Even BIOS is overkill to load Linux if your chipset supports coreboot.
Macs went to EFI over four years ago. Hard to believe it took the windows machines this long to take the leap?
The average user doesn't know and wouldn't give a shit if they did. Ergo, this kind of change in the PC market is driven by the interests of the vendors, as the consumer essentially has none. That said, it's worth noting that some consumer PCs have used EFI since 2003 and Itanium workstations were using EFI back in 2000, and x64 versions of Windows added support for EFI in 2008.
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.
It's worth noting that one advantage of EFI to vendors is precisely that it better enables them to lock down a system than BIOS does. While it doesn't have to be used that way, you can safely bet that many vendors will use it that way to the detriment of the consumer. It's also not without (in my opinion, valid) criticism for adding additional complexity to the system without actually resolving the problems of BIOS.
The main advantage appears lie in offering a GUI for end users to manipulate system settings that they lack the knowledge or inclination to tinker with. To be fair, it does add some convenience features and better support for large drives, but I haven't seen anything about EFI to get terribly excited about.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Yo Dawg. I heard you liked using a basic input output system to boot your computer.
So we put a basic IO system to boot your basic IO system for your system.
BIOS is dead. Long Live BIOS?
I've moved all my machines to GPT. I understand the need to keep around some legacy stuff, but BIOS and the MS-DOS partition table really need to step aside for some new technology. They lasted us ~30 years, but the hoops you have to jump through to boot some newer stuff is getting annoying.
IIRC EFI also defines a standard way for the OS to update settings
That's "Enhanced Rootkit and Virii Support (tm)" not for the OS.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
Perhaps Symantec needs to update its Ghost to run on Linux, for example, as Ghost currently runs on DOS which uses BIOS hooks for I/O.
Did you write this in 2004? Ghost has been running fine on Linux for a while now. In fact, Symantec's Linux boot disks have better driver support and more functionality than both the DOS and WinPE boot disks.
I'm stepping on your lawn.
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.
The only thing I really want from a BIOS setup screen is some detailed online help for some of the options. Who here hasn't had a BIOS that had some obscure acronym titled option thats either missing in the manual or has a vague engrish description along the lines of "Turns Foo On/Off".