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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.'"
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?
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.
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?
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EFI can have BIOS compatibility modules installed. So it *MIGHT* cause compatibility issues, or it might not.. depends on the motherboard manufacturer, and if they include BIOS compatibility. You may also be able to add BIOS modules later.
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Good bye, and good riddance.
I agree 100%. I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y710 and I would like to punch in the face whoever wrote its BIOS. I'd also like to kick in the junk whoever his/her boss was who approved it.
This laptop is capable of VT-x and was ADVERTISED with it as a feature, but it's disabled in the BIOS and can't be turned on.
This laptop is incapable of hibernating and sleeping in any OS except the crappy Vista it came with. A few versions of Ubuntu ago I was able to patch my DSDT table using the Intel compiler and then I was finally able to hibernate, but doing so still took just as long (3 minutes maybe?) to boot, so it was useless anyway. Since then the linux kernel people took out the patch that allowed an alternate DSDT to be used.
The Intel compiler says I have 12 errors in my DSDT alone, and who knows how many other BIOS tables have screwups that the Microsoft compiler doesn't care about because it knows how to get around the errors when booting a Microsoft system. According to Lenovo, Vista is the only supported OS, so if Vista doesn't have problems, they're "not bugs". Bullshit.
Anyway, enough ranting. The keyword behind UEFI is the U, as in Universal. It's still a pretty vague concept but it is definitely an area that could use some improvement, and I could see more operating systems than just the "vendor supported" one benefiting from such a system.
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?
If by "BIOS" you mean "the system which loads the OS" then indeed UEFI is just a BIOS. There are also loads of other such systems, like the OpenFirmware (OFW) which, from playing around on my OLPC XO-1, can do traditionally high-level things such as scanning for Wifi networks, displaying a live Webcam image, interacting with the mouse, etc. There is also CoreBoot (formerly LinuxBIOS) which was designed for boot speed (on supercomputers), and there are probably loads more. In fact, my Amiga 1200 from 1992 had a boot menu which used the same GUI as the OS (like this http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/images/wb_30_1.gif ), since part of the OS was stored inside onboard chips.
"BIOS" also has another, more formal meaning though, which is the programming calls it implements. Using these calls within a piece of code will work on any system with a BIOS, but not necessarily on any of the alternatives. However, they can be emulated on top of these other systems without anything noticing (like BootCamp does).
The sheer number of repetitions of "trusted computing" and "trusted platform" in that document make the hair on the back of my neck rise.
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.
I quite like Linus on EFI:
There are already BIOS rootkits (or malware of some sort that tires to re-infect you), and at least UEFI will attempt to address the issue (most PC motherboard BIOSs can be reflashed from Windows; a fact that has not escaped the notice of botnet writers. Ultimately we need something like trusted computing to lock down the BIOS, and as I understand it UEFI has some flexibility, so it doesn't have to be TPM-based.
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Interesting counterpoint - I mean that, not being sarcastic.
Maybe EFI isn't a golden solution, I'm not familiar enough with EFI on a low level to comment. Perhaps I just blindly support it because I just want 'SOMETHING' to replace BIOS. Specifically I like that the Mac platform can be entirely managed from the OS, ie) setting boot device priority, power management etc along side the rest of your OS settings. The whole PC model of having certain settings configured only in BIOS and others via the OS seems rather odd by modern standards. It gets quirkier when there are overlaps in features between BIOS settings and OS settings (power management being the best example).
I'd also like better features on power-up. Specifically, as I still setup a few headless PCs for BSD and Linux servers, it annoys me that serial console is not available until, at a minimum, you reach the bootloader of the OS. All 'settings' in BIOS are completely inaccessible in a headless serial environment as things currently stand.
I also rather enjoy the 'target disk mode' on Macs that will instantly turn your system into an external firewire attached drive on startup. This is extremely handy for recovering files from an unbootable or otherwise corrupt OS without having to physically remove the drive.
Adopting EFI wouldn't necessarily mean we gain such features, but it seems to me EFI would make such features more feasible. I guess in summary, I'm not necessarily pro EFI, but I want to see something far more modern and capable replace the obsolete BIOS we are currently stuck with.
Perhaps eliminating BIOS and adopting EFI isn't even necessary to unify things and address the limitations, I may just be equating the two even if they are not necessarily mutually inclusive.
Regardless, the PC world needs something better than BIOS, I'm not aware of any alternatives to EFI that may better accomodate this.
Glad that got linked, UEFI is really more an extension of the BIOS. So saying it "will be dead in three years" is somewhat misleading.
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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 have an DEC Alpha box from the late 1980's that does just that. In 64-bits of course. The interesting thing is that the firmware includes a fairly complete OSF/1 UNIX implementation right there in the chip. This means that you can boot into a straight Sys V , complete with terminal and network, without even having anything on the disk. It actually works pretty good.
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