Phoenix to embed bootup ads in BIOS

quonsar writes "According to ZDNet, Phoenix today announced plans to embed bootup ads in BIOS by 4Q 1999. Take a look at the story: Phoenix to sell Windows launch ads. Phoenix has formed a subsidiary, ebetween,to sell the ads. "

Comments

Clearing up some BIOS misconceptions

[timur]

Ok, it looks like I need to chime in here. For the record, I am a BIOS developer for Dell Computer. Here's how things work in the BIOS land:

A BIOS is specific to a particular motherboard. It's not possible to create a generic BIOS, because the job of the BIOS is primarily to initialize the motherboard hardware. Many of the chips on a modern motherboard are very compex, such as Rambus memory controllers and SuperIO IC's. These devices take thousands of lines of assembly code to initialize.

The OpenBIOS FAQ has some errors in it:

1. The FAQ says that the primary job is to boot the OS - this is false. Booting the OS is the last thing the BIOS does at startup, and this feature hasn't really changed in 15 years, with the exception the modern BIOS's can now boot CD-ROM drives and Zip drives. Only 1% of the BIOS code is allocated to this function.

2. The FAQ says that "proprietary BIOSes have usually been written with one operating system formost in mind." This is also false. For instance, when you shut down the computer, Windows will send a call to the BIOS to power down the machine. Windows itself can't do this, because each machine is different, but the BIOS provides an API which Windows can call. AFAIK, all of these specs are 100% open, so that any OS can call them. However, Windows is usually the first OS to use these API's as they come out, mostly because Microsoft cares a lot about this issue. I can tell you in at least one instance, an "enhancement" to the BIOS that Microsoft recommended was immediately dismissed because it would be incompatible with Linux.

In my opinion, OpenBIOS is doomed to failure. The rate at which new systems are created is way too rapid for any one team to keep up. There are only a handful of people with the skills necessary to write a BIOS, and none of them can afford (as individuals) the hardware necessary to debug their code - the ICE sitting next to me costs over $10K and it's the low-end model. Not only that, but most of the information needed is not publically available and would be impossible for me to get if I didn't work for a major OEM already. Look at the hardware that OpenBIOS currently supports: a 386 and a 486 system!! Talk about outdated!

Because the BIOS is specific to a motherboard, any OEM which makes its own motherboards (like Dell does for some of our systems) must have a customized BIOS. I can't speak for all Dell systems (I only work on the high-end desktop machines), but in our case we do our own customizations. The alternative is to ask the BIOS vendor (e.g. Phoeniz or AMI) to make the customizations. Your guess is as good as mine as to how often this happens.

--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address

An ad I'd like to see.

[Stavr0]

131072kb OK

Hard drive detection
[80] MXT-10000 10.2GB
[83] ATAPI CD-ROM

Still booting Windows ???
Get a REAL Operating System!
Linux. It's free. What are you waiting for?

Starting MS-DOS ...
- - -

Ugh, there are much better uses for that space

[jandrese]

Maybe I'm the only one here, but I'd like to see a REAL help system in a BIOS. Every BIOS I've seen that has a help feature just gives you a list of the possible options for a feature. What I want is a short descripion of what a feature is and what reason a person would have to enable or disable it. It is just not very helpful to get to an option menu on a BIOS and find something like PMAS and a "help menu" of "Yes/No".

Of course that is just one example, there are gobs of things you could do with that extra space besides putting in Windows specific advertising (modifiying the filesystem from the BIOS?!? Yuck!).