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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.'"
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've seen quite a few machines like this when I did computer repair. Most were major brands at the time -- Compaq, Packard Bell, etc -- and the GUI tended to be a knockoff of Windows 3.1.
Presumably this was to make users less afraid of changing their BIOS settings, although considering some of the users I dealt with, that might not have been such a good idea.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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!
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?
They'll do the same with EFI.
n/t
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.
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?
Linux has supported EFI for quite some time. And EFI has BIOS compatibility modes (or it can.. that's one of those "extensible" things). Mac's, for instance, use EFI and have since they went Intel (possibly earlier, but I think the Intel macs were the first).
Linus is not a big fan of EFI though.. says it's a bigger, clunkier bios.
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...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.
No, Microsoft implemented EFI in Vista, although they only put it in the 64 bit versions IIRC. I can't wait for 32 bit Windows to die a horrible death... then more people (like Adobe) will start fully supporting 64 bit windows (and no, 64 bit Photoshop is not enough, let's get a 64 bit flash).
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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...
It's more than that. This will cause a DOS compatibility issue. This means that the floppy boot process and other handy-dandy things we've been doing that uses DOS of some kind (Microsoft, IBM, FreeDOS, whatever) to boot up and get devices working through the config.sys and all that used BIOS hooks to get much of the I/O accomplished.
I don't know whether or not UEFI's services provide compatible techniques or if whole new things need to be created, but it would seem to me that many low-level recovery and imaging tools may be lost to us. 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.
http://www.funkygoods.com/schwarzschild/2008_11/ami_titan_05_s.jpg
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.
You should switch to FOG, it is free and uses PXE. It is better than Ghost in every way.
None of what you speak of should be done with dos floppies in 2010, linux boot usb sticks are the way to do this stuff.
Ghost also runs in the WinPE boot environment without any problems. WinPE should boot off EFI based systems without a problem as it's used in the Vista and 7 boot DVDs. Just run Ghost32.exe from within WinPE and use Ghost like you always have.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
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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The point isn't the GUI. The point is that EFI is a REPL, much like Sun + Apple's OpenFirmware. The BIOS just does a few things: scan ram, handle input and output. Your "BIOS screen" really didn't have anything to do with the BIOS, except that the BIOS hosted it. (Presumably you could load up new firmwares through it, which would change how the BIOS is programmed to operate)
Now, picture a world where device drivers are written at the EFI level, using a nice language. Where any operating system that speaks EFI can use any hardware with EFI drivers.
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.
HW Manufacturers will require EFI firmware to be signed in order to install it. See "executable verification" in this PDF
The sheer number of repetitions of "trusted computing" and "trusted platform" in that document make the hair on the back of my neck rise.
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
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.
"Perhaps Symantec needs to update its Ghost to run on Linux, for example"
Linux runs fine, who needs Ghost?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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 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.
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.
C|N>K
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".
I haven't seen a floppy in almost 10 years.
I'm glad you got over your erectile dysfunction.
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