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Upgrades Hardware

BIOS' Days Are Numbered 513

Posted by timothy from the all-days-are-numbered dept.
Ninja Master Gara writes "While this article shows Phoenix expanding the uses of the bios, ZDNet UK reports Intel is looking to get rid of it altogether, to be replaced with the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) as announced at the Intel Developer Forum. EFI promises a considerable amount of flexibility to system control and startup, legacy support, and programability. And it gets rid of text mode only start up too."
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BIOS' Days Are Numbered More

BIOS' Days Are Numbered

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  • No more? (Score:2, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 )

    No more bios? Might as well cancel my cable, Biography was one of the only good shoes on A&E.
  • but why dont they use openfirmware?

    • because (Score:5, Informative)

      by SHEENmaster ( 581283 ) <travis&utk,edu> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:35PM (#5349029) Homepage Journal
      openfirmware is usable rather than pretty?
      because it proves that a firmware can be cooler without ASCII art or pain-in-the-arse GUI?

      OpenFirmware, for those who don't know, is a solution adopted by Sun, Apple, and other big names. A partition on the hard disk contains the firmware which can be accessed through certain key combos. You can then give it commands to boot certain partitions and other such shit; stuff I'd like in my peecee's BIOS.

      Check it out. [openfirmware.org]

      • Re:because (Score:4, Informative)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:11PM (#5349215) Homepage Journal
        One small correction: I don't know how Sun does it, but on Apple machines, the OpenFirmware lives in ROM, not on the hard disk. I'd guess that Sun does the same thing.

        But yeah, it's cool.
        • Yep, on every (ultra)sparc that I've met (and also on mine) openfirmware lives in ROM.

          And yeah, I agree OpenFirmware kicks butt. Netbooting never was easier :)

        • but on Apple machines, the OpenFirmware lives in ROM, not on the hard disk. I'd guess that Sun does the same thing.

          Yes, they do, and have done so ever since they invented Open Boot, which was the basis for OpenFirmware.

        • Re:because (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Lee Cremeans ( 873 )
          Yes, OpenFirmware and OpenBoot are usually in ROM. I think the original poster was getting confused with the Apple "NewWorld" Mac OS ROM file, which is loaded by Open Firmware on the iMac, Blue and White G3 and newer. It contains the basic MacOS routines that used to be in ROM (along with a ELF loader stub, a small startup icon, and a short Forth program to unpack everything and start the stub).

          -lee

      • Re:because (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @10:15PM (#5349541)
        OpenFirmware does NOT live on the Hard Drive, it lives in Flash ROM so it's semi-permanent. Compaq tried putting a BIOS Setup program on a 'secret' partition on the old Deskpro 2/4/6XXX machines and it was a total hassle to fix them if the drive died or somrthing happened to the partition, you had to load the BIOS Setup from _DISKETTES_. It was cool to have a GUI Setup with full diagnostics, but when the drive died so did the convenience. Don't even get me started on upgrading hard disks on those things.

      • Re:because (Score:4, Informative)

        by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @10:55PM (#5349731)
        Like other's said, it actually lives in a flash ROM chip. Think of it like the BIOS and GRUB combined. It groks networking, all of your disks (tape, cdrom, harddrive, etc), and lots of other things.

        You can diagnose hardware errors with it, you can boot off the network with it, you can specify which device you want to boot from, (on multi proc systems, you can specify which CPU will be the 'boot strap' cpu), and you can tell it if you want it to boot at all (if you want it to come up to just the eeprom after a power cycle.)

        It's all sorts of goodness. I can't tell you how many times it's saved the day on our sun boxen. And for the hyper masochistic, there's a full blown forth interpreter.

        And get this: It doesn't suck. (though it does generally mean something is sucking wind when you are working at that level).

  • Text mode start up screens (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MoThugz ( 560556 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:15PM (#5348853) Homepage
    ...are cool! I don't need fancy graphics just so that my graphics card can get it's early morning POST exercise.

    Why do we need to glorify the start-up screen when text can do just fine... If I wanted glorified startup screens I'd boot up my AIX RS/6000 thank you very much.

    • Re:Text mode start up screens (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The problem with graphics bootup is that if there is a hardware problem, you will see nothing. Displaying a text message like 'bus barfed' is trivial, handling a terrible, terrible problem in gfx mode, not so.

      The problem with PCs is that they are generally consumer-servicable and are designed so that you can plug all kinds of hardware into it. This calls for an extensive and reliable startup code that can tell you something more than you could deduct from the fact your OS is not booting. I know my computer is Compaq/HP/IBM, I'd appreciate something else than a purrty BIOS logo.

      • Re:Text mode start up screens - Alien! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:17PM (#5349240) Homepage
        Personally, I'd like mine to boot up like that one out of the film "Alien", complete with flickery graphics and blipping as it writes to the display. I always thought that looked cool. I certainly don't need reminding who built the motherboard in 16 million colours every time I start up.

        And another thing - what's to stop MS "embracing" a few MB makers and converting the boards to boot only one OS - say, for example, Windows? It would be trivial to add proprietary code to this, which prevented anything else booting - obviously then anyone adding the required code to boot, say, anything else would be violating our favourite law...
    • If I wanted glorified startup screens I'd boot up my AIX RS/6000 thank you very much.
      ah? why? rs/6000 plays Thus Speak Zarathustra at startup?
    • Because jpg pr0n looks better than ascii pr0n?

      *I used to think ppl that got giddy on ascii pr0n back in the bbs days were *WEIRD*

    • Re:Text mode start up screens (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:42PM (#5349070) Journal
      "Text mode start up screen are cool! I don't need fancy graphics just so that my graphics card can get it's early morning POST exercise."

      Who needs text OR graphics? My brother got a new Asus A7N8X Deluxe [asus.com] board for his birthday (along with a new Athlon XP and DDR RAM) and I was shocked to hear the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!

      You'd hear in a sort of female type voice that the bootup was complete and the OS was loading. How about that for advanced boot?

      • I have that board... nixed the voice after only a day or two. It's very annoying (and really bad sound quality). And they did it wrong... it shouldn't say anything if the post went fine... it should only talk if there was a problem, saying what the problem was.

        Oh, and one major beef I have with this board already: it doesn't have SMART monitoring for the harddrives!!! At least I haven't been able to find any sign of it and my email to tech support went ignored.

    • Re:Text mode start up screens (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ian Peon ( 232360 ) <ian AT epperson DOT com> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @10:43PM (#5349667)
      A Winblows PC I put together for my parents several years ago had a GUI BIOS screen. Detected the mouse, and showed a rudimentery windows style interface. "Not bad" I thought at the time...

      This turned out to be BAD magic. See, my dad got into the BIOS by accident one day (they left lots of papers and other junk on the keyboard) and thought it was some kind of new Windows screen he hadn't seen before. Well, he knew he had to enter a password to get to the Internet, so he clicked that little "password" icon and entered a password... and that didn't work, so he did it again with a different password. He repeated that several times (not remembering the LAST password he typed), then gave up by selecting "quit". Computer rebooted and asked him for a password, which he didn't remember.

      I was never able to get that board to boot again. Couldn't find the password recovery, it didn't have a jumper to clear the settings and pulling the battery for a day didn't help.

      My opinion since then is that BIOS level setup screens SHOULD look scary to novice users!
      • I've seen a similar situation, except it was a factory screwup, where a bunch of motherboards shipped with BIOS password enabled and apparently garbled, as the usual "default passwords" didn't work. To add insult to injury, it was a cheapassed board where they'd saved half a cent by not putting any pins into the CMOS-password-clear and external battery jumpers (pins 2-3 of the latter usually works as complete-clear-CMOS). Had to figure out which were supposed to be the external battery pins (circuit was there, just no pins) and short across 'em with a screwdriver.

  • We can't (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If we can't get rid of other widely spread things like the TCP/IP protocol, what makes you think we can get rid of BIOS?

  • Yeah get rid of BIOS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:15PM (#5348858) Homepage
    by giving it some other fancy name! U need to have something between hardware and the OS. Call it whatever you want to call
    • Today you don't need anything "between hardware and OS". The kernel (AFAIK about Linux kernel) works directly with hardware resources. Old DOS did not have any kernel (Bill Gates was not so smart to write one), instead it had so-called bios.sys - the module which just called BIOS for some IO functions from the BIOS chip. Those days it was done for performance. I guess, today no OS use it.

      Another function of BIOS was (and still is) to give the chance to configure some hardware CMOS parameters. Again, DOS was not able to do that. With Linux kernel you have NVRAM driver, which can change most of such parameters right from OS. I don't know any parameters, which either today or in near future would be unable to be set from a NVRAM driver of the OS kernel.

      The main reason of changing those parameters was inflexibility. But today nonody will set IDE disk parameters - instead they used AUTO. Same for many other things. Although, some of CMOS might not be automatically tuned up, I am not sure.

      The last (from what I can recall right now) reason to still use BIOS is to point to the boot device. Perhaps that the function that will survive longer than other. At least that's the on;y function I still use in Apple's firmware :)

      • dos dint use the bios for performance reasons at all it used it so that no matter what ibm compat. computer use used you were still able to use the hard drive, floppy ect. It dint matter what type of hard drive or controller. If your hardware linked to the bios you dint need to load a driver to use it at all. And btw, you still need the bios for when you first boot up the computer as it access the hard drive in order to load the OS

      • Re:Yeah get rid of BIOS (Score:5, Informative)

        by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:38PM (#5349343)
        (Bill Gates was not so smart to write one)

        Billy boy didn't write the original DOS code, so it was not an issue of him "not being smart enough".

        Those days it was done for performance.

        No, the high performance calls skipped the bios. Back then the bios was mainly useful because many of the clones could be BIOS compatable with the PC thereby making getting a version of DOS to work properly on it was much easier. However, if you wanted performance, you'd call the
        Another function of BIOS was (and still is) to give the chance to configure some hardware CMOS parameters.

        Not back then. There were no cmos parameters back in the DOS days. Heck, pc's didn't even have battery backed clocks until much later. Hard disks were an expensive luxury and you had to run utility apps straight from the controller's ROM to do things like low level formatting.

      • Re:Yeah get rid of BIOS (Score:4, Informative)

        by Trepalium ( 109107 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @10:03PM (#5349472)
        Except you missed a lot of what the BIOS performs today. Today, it's still used to boot the system from various devices (floppy, CD, USB device, hard drive, network), to (hopefully) optimally preconfigure the hardware before the OS looks at it, to provide 32-bit functions for the OS to enumerate PCI devices, to provide APM and ACPI configuration and power management functions. The role of the BIOS hasn't decreased as the years have gone past, but increased.


        Regardless of what you want to call it, something has to handle the hardware until the OS can get enough information to intelligently start itself up. That means rudimentary disk I/O (int 13h), video I/O (int 10h), and so on.

      • Re:Yeah get rid of BIOS (Score:4, Informative)

        by redgekko ( 320391 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @10:57PM (#5349738) Homepage Journal
        So we've taken what was once hardware jumper settings such as CPU voltage, moved them to BIOS config options, and now let's bypass that altogether allowing the OS itself to change these settings. That's just wonderful, I can't wait to read the report on W32.CrispyCPU.Trojan.

  • Hardware OS's ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vano2001 ( 617789 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:16PM (#5348865)
    So will we finally be able to embed (part of) our favourite OS into the PC hardware? Remember the Amiga OS ... it had parts of its OS inside the ROM (intuition and other libraries (for graphics drawing and windowing)). A step forward... couple this with FlashCard RAM or otherwise.. and you can make some nice embedded systems. (Real NetPCs running linux with no CD/HD anyone?)

  • OpenFirmware pls (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jpt.d ( 444929 ) <`moc.sregor' `ta' `llafba'> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:16PM (#5348866)
    What else is there to say? OpenFirmware works nice

    • Re:OpenFirmware pls (Score:3, Interesting)

      by spoon42 ( 41389 )
      To make a point, Open Firmware works nice *now*. I've seen firsthand the difference between OF on an old Mac G3 and a new G4; it took years to get things worked out. Hopefully Intel won't be cursing PC hackers with years of bugs, missing functionality (older OF versions couldn't boot CDs, or could but couldn't read ISO9660, etc.), and unintelligible DEFAULT CATCH and CLAIM FAILED messages.

      Or they might get it right the first time. Or they might use something that already works. I'm not optimistic though.

  • Goodbye BIOS as well as.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by cK-Gunslinger ( 443452 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:16PM (#5348871) Journal

    Goodbye floppy drive.
    • What will replace the floppy drive? Granted, it's antique, and @#$ing slow, but what other method do you have to transfer small files easily between two computers, without the net? Granted, everything should just be net based, but what happens if your net connection goes down? Floppy drives are simple, easy to use, and widely available in PCs. Also, you can't monitor a floppy drive like you can emails ;)
      • Dell is dropping the floppy [slashdot.org] as part of their standard configuration and they seem to be favoring USB flash dongles and CD-RWs. Gateway has started including a 6 in 1 (Sd/MMC, CF, SM, etc) card readers with one of their Laptop Models (The 400L [gateway.com]). The new technologies will battle it out for the "Ubiquitous" title. I'm voting for the USB dongle since it seems to be the most univeral.

        The point is that the only reason floppies are still around is that so many of us "old folk" are comfortable with them. There is better technology available! You can boot from CD, or even from USB dongles if you need to. (Maybe we could market a l33t h@x0r pw reset USB dongle...)

        Let it go.. We let go of the 8-track (most of us any way), we let go of our Commodore 64s, our Apple IIs, the 5.25" Drive. It's time to let go of the venerable 3.5" and make room for new and better solutions.

        If there's something that you can do with a floppy that you can't do with SD/MMC, CDR/RW, or a USB dongle, speak up, I'd love to hear it!
    • Goodbye BIOS as well as..

      Goodbye floppy drive.

      Oh, great. Doesn't Intel know Apple is evil, closed, proprietary hardware? If they insist on turning my beloved PeeCee hardware into a Mac, then I'm going to ...

      um...

      boycott them. Or something.

  • Anandtech has coverage as well (Score:5, Informative)

    by adpowers ( 153922 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:17PM (#5348880)
    Anandtech has a page [anandtech.com] about EFI as well. It also includes pictures of computers with EFI.

  • Stricter Enforcement for DRM (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Apple Acolyte ( 517892 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:17PM (#5348885)
    If BIOS isn't broken, one wonders why there needs to be a fix. One can pretty confidently assume that such a change would usher in stricter enforcement for DRM. And I'm sure it simply solidifies the work MS largely completed through its XP registration scheme. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but can any of you blame me?
  • Great, another piece of hardware/software trying to do more than it should that won't work very well, and be just one more source of blame when things aren't working. Sweet.

  • Gets rid of text-mode startup? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:18PM (#5348894)
    I _like_ text mode startup.

    Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.

    If you're a geek, you definitely want the boot information. If you're not, just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...

    • Exactly. I like the text startup too. I don't like waiting for 256 million bytes to count, but I can always skip that.

      You can really tell the difference between a piece of junk HP, and a generic MoBo when you fire a machine up. With an HP, they don't even trust a user to not press F10 to enter setup, so they don't tell the user how to access it. GRRRR!

      The new feature of giving the system's vital statistics is cool too. You can see if your fans are running, and your system temperature after rebooting, just before the OS starts to load.

    • Re:Gets rid of text-mode startup? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:29PM (#5348988)
      Just because it does away with text-mode startup doesn't mean it can't give you all the information it does currently. Just like replacing a line-printer with an inkjet doesn't mean you can't use it for text printing.
      • >Just like replacing a line-printer with an inkjet doesn't mean you can't use it for text printing.

        And, just like replacing a line printer with an inkjet printer, it's a much slower, lower quality, harder to read, and more expensive way to do exactly the same thing.

        GO INTeL!
    • Uh, post codes are a series of auditory beeps there chief.

      And I don't know what you're booting up with, but nothing about my bios or hardware information reminds me in the LEAST of the Matrix. Do you drive through canyons with your folks on vacations and pretend you're flying in the canyons of the death star?

    • Re:Gets rid of text-mode startup? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:31PM (#5348997)
      Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.

      Of course there is absolutely no reason why a graphical startup can't (perhaps optionally) display all the usual POST test messages. A good example of this is Mac OS X: by default you don't see the Open Firmware messages during startup but you can turn them on and get all the information you would expect.

      If you're not [a geek], just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...

      Some text-mode BIOSes already do this. The issue is not text vs. graphics, its what features and options does your particular EFI or BIOS vendor give you.

    • Now I'm only assuming that this new standard they're inventing will have some sort of debugging mode, or else it really won't fly. Quick, Eye-candy laden startups would be nice too.

      The thing about it is, I totally expected a post like this. Sure, mod me down as a troll, but this is what happens when the slashdot crowd gets whiff of a new standard in the PC market. Below I have exampled this effect of "reverse luddite-ism".

      Dell shipping with no more floppy discs? Oh no! whatever will we do? How about a bootable cd? Seriously. I haven't used my floppy in ages. They're unreliable, slow, and have a tendency to destroy an important term paper that's on it. Good riddance.

      Whaaaaaaat?!! Office XP is going to FORCE me to register?!! Why I never! Yes, they ask you what country you live in. If you're not pirating your copy of Office, this ain't no big deal.

      Poo-poo to this EFI. I'll never use it! I need diagnostic info! I like text! Besides, Microsoft will hijack it somehow! Like I said before, it won't become a standard unless you CAN use it for diagnostic information. AND, since we're talking about a new standard here, maybe it will cure a lot of the problems that you might need BIOS to debug!

      PS - half of my post was funny. The other half is true. Mod accordingly.

    • I don't know about your machines, but my machines say extremely little under the control of the BIOS. There's a thing that gives the copyright notice and counts the memory, and then a thing that show the detected hardware, then it passes everything off to LILO, which uses it a little and then goes into Linux, which doesn't use the BIOS at all. Then the messages start appearing.

      I'd like to see a BIOS-replacement that actually provided some information and used good resolution (my monitor has the resolution to display everything the BIOS and Linux during startup produce in a readable font, all on the screen at once; but not in text mode) and could use pictures (memory bank 3 is dead-- here's a photo of the motherboard showing which one that is...).
    • I care for a different reason: the biggest curse of the PC BIOS is the fact it only works with attached heads and hands. I want it to work without requiring me to sit in front of the system.

      I *hope* that's what the LAN access will achieve, and that we won't be left with a shitty, sit-in-the-machine-room experience with more colours.

      Also, the LAN stuff, while potentially cool, could also be a pain in the arse from a security point of view. WOL has cause conniptions for come people in the past, and that's very simple indeed.

  • Why not (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bofkentucky ( 555107 ) <bofkentucky@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:19PM (#5348904) Homepage Journal
    OpenBoot, its an IEEE standard, Sun and Apple use it, its user programable, and cool as hell. Thankfully I rarely use it though, our (production) sun boxes have been nearly flawless since I started. Playing with it at Sun Sysadmin I class last week was one of the neatest things I've done in awhile on a PC. Do any of the other Unix (HPaq, SGI, IBM) vendors use OpenBoot?

    • #s/PC/box/g
      #less beer

    • Re:Why not (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Hiro Antagonist ( 310179 )
      I'd like to see OpenBoot, or something like it myself. One of the biggest strengths of the Sun line of hardware is that I can do everything from power management, to hardware configuration, to installing an OS over a serial connction. Not that nifty when you're dealing with a workstation, but when you've got a rack of twenty servers, it's a lifesaver.

      • Re:Why not (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:38PM (#5349345)
        Sun's boot proms have a fully functional forth interpreter in them. Thankfully it's rarely needed these days, but it's there for when it really hits the fan.

        Heck, it's even possible to 'mount' a file system, and use a line editor to fix things (granted, it's easier to boot single user, and go from there, but again, if things are really FUBAR'ed...)
    • I don't know about HPaq or IBM, but I do know that SGI uses an ARCS PROM. It's similar to OpenBoot/OpenFirmware, and can be used for booting into other OSes (NetBSD/MIPS for one), but it's not quite as feature-filled. Newer SGIs (Origin 300, Origin 3000, Fuel, Altix) also have an "L1" controller system that keeps track of temperatures, module power, system partitioning, etc. It's somewhat similar to Sun's LOM controllers, though several SGI L1 devices can be connected to an L2 controller (touch screen LCD controller) or to an L3 controller (a 1U rackmount PC running Linux driving a fancy GUI and web interface).

    • Open Firmware URL (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) has a homepage [sun.com]. As does the IEEE working group [openfirmware.org]. There's also a DMOZ/Google category [google.com].

  • Startup Screens (Score:3, Funny)

    by secondsun ( 195377 ) <secondsun@gmail.com> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:19PM (#5348905) Journal
    Well the Bios almost outlived the floppy ;).
  • Is that Intel speak for Paladium? No thanks, Intel.

  • It's about time. (Score:5, Funny)

    by entrylevel ( 559061 ) <jaundoh@yahoo.com> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:20PM (#5348916)
    I mean, even my 1992 Toyota uses EFI . Way to keep up with the times, Intel!
  • Tomorrow's news: Intel gives Phoneix the boot, or would that be take away the boot?

    Either way, Instant ON is way overdue.

    Yo Grark
    Canadian Bred with American Buttering.

  • Uh Oh! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:22PM (#5348935) Homepage
    Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers...

    I'm guessing Microsoft is already adding code to windows to wipe out that last part from machines, as it might "confuse people"...

    Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
    • Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers...

      So, if EFI lives on the hard disk, how does the boot code get from the hard drive to the memory and into the CPU? Sounds like Intel needs to invent a bootloader for EFI. Since it deals with such basic tasks, they could call it the Basic Input Output System.

      oh, wait...

      • Re:Uh Oh! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MrDelSarto ( 95771 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:31PM (#5349305) Homepage
        Though I realise you are being sarcastic, there is obviously some misunderstanding of how this works as evidenced by other posts in this thread.

        EFI is firmware; from the moment you switch on your machine EFI is in control of it. You can quite optionally have EFI Applications that are stored on a non-volatile storage area (probably a hard disk) in a modified FAT partition. Seeing as you wanted to know, these are in Microsoft Portable Executable format, which is a form of COFF. But you can easily develop them under (ELF based) linux with gnu-efi. It's just like a normal C program, you can allocate memory etc etc. Elilo is the EFI boot loader and it works pretty much like lilo.

        You can even have EFI drivers that extended EFI to do other cool things.

        In essence, it's like having DOS built right in.

    • Re:Uh Oh! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 )
      Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
      It's not just that. More flexible "BIOSes" can add so much power to a system. An example of this, and one that's very near to my heart, is the ability to boot from anything. Pretty much every BIOS out there is unable to boot from at least some devices; the most common approach is a catch-all "SCSI" boot entry, which may be a SCSI device or it may be a ZIP drive or... Even then, half the time it just doesn't work and you can't boot from your add-on IDE controller card.

      A better BIOS would solve this by getting a much clearer idea of what sort of hardware is in the system and what can be done with it. Got a USB hard drive you want to boot from? No problem: EFI knows how to read USB disks, so it grabs the files it needs and boots from it. Want to boot from your second CD drive instead of your first? Just pick "cdrom1" instead of "cdrom0" and you're all set. Want to boot over the network, but don't have DHCP? Set your NIC's IP address in EFI and tell it where to grab the boot image from using TFTP.

      And then there's the nifty trick Suns have of being able to interrupt the operating system, no matter what, and drop you back into the "BIOS." I'm told there's even a debugger in there that you can use to debug the same system you're using (in case of kernel traps and such).

      A more flexible, versatile, and powerful BIOS is a very cool thing, and even everyday desktop users will be aware of its benefits (though they may not know the source of them). People who use PCs for serious work have lusted after this sort of thing for a long time.

  • I can't tell you how many times I was stymied by BIOS crapolla while consulting.

    I still don't pretend to understand all of it, but what bothered me was that I used to go to these Toronto computer shows and there would be these little books for sale on the BIOS, 4 of them, consisting of 5 pages of 8 x 10 photocopies folded over and stapled in the middle with a cheap colour cover on them. In other words, cheapest possible production values.

    They went into detail on the BIOS and were EXACTLY what I needed, but the guy wanted twenty five bucks EACH for them.

    I wouldn't have bought them even if I could, but I swore one day I would and publish them for free all over the BBS world (This was pre-Internet)

    Now it looks like I won't have to, but I'm still pissed off. Charging a fortune for stuff people really needed is wrong.

  • no, wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:32PM (#5349007)
    The BIOS should be replaced by another, hardware-vendor supplied GUI--that's just going in the wrong direction. I mean, who is going to talk to this thing? Why should something become easy to use that, if it ever enters the consciousness of the end user, is most likely going to result in the machine being returned for service anyway? Is software or hardware going to come with lengthy instructions for booting into the BIOS and fiddling with endless configuration screends?

    "Normal" home users, the kinds of people who might benefit from a GUI, probably don't want to talk to anything other than their main, mainstream OS. And power users and network administrators want the hardware to come with a system that can be scripted, extended, and remotely controlled. And almost everything that needs to be done with the BIOS-replacement should be done from the regular OS, which can leave little scripts in non-volatile areas for what the BIOS-replacement should do when it reboots (as opposed to putting those instructions into the user's brain).

    Yes, the BIOS needs a serious overhaul, and, yes, it needs to change a bit in the direction of becoming a better OS. But it should become a better OS that normal users never have to talk to directly. It should become a 32bit/64bit OS that much more than previously accomplishes its magic behind the scenes. If it needs a GUI at all, the GUI should probably consist of a web server (so that the BIOS can be configured over the net) and a built-in, simple web browser, not some Microsoft-wannabe-lookalike.

    • The only thing I can add to this is... "Avoid small system mentallity".

      You want it easy for Joe-Six-Pack? Fine. Don't lock out the sysadmins and techs that have to support 18K+ desktops. The single most fustrating thing about Microfsck products is their inabillity to scale to large enviroments. That, and they are so bad they don't even suck.

      And that's really bad.

  • We need to start chopping some of the legacy fat out of systems now a days.
    It's kind of annoying still seeing things like standard x86 startup screens.

    It seems like intel has been on a rampage of reform lately. With the Intanium2 (in hopes of getting rid of the ancient x86 chipset architecture), the Centrino (to give laptops better battery life), and now this bios change.

  • Good ol' Intel (Score:5, Informative)

    by LesPaul75 ( 571752 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:34PM (#5349021) Journal
    They aren't getting rid of BIOS, they are just making it bigger (and more bloated). Claiming that they are "getting rid of" the BIOS is just their way of hyping their new, lucky-special BIOS. I write BIOS code for a living [shudder] and I've seen EFI. A better name for it would be "C-BIOS" or something like that, because that's what it is: a BIOS written in C. They've packed a lot of things into it, which may or may not be useful, like networking and a GUI. They've been pushing EFI for a long time, and I don't think they've had much success. I guess that they'll just force it down everyone's throat by putting it on all of their own chipsets and hope everyone else will follow suit. Personally, as a BIOS d00d, I hope that they have about as much success with this as they did with Rambus. :)
  • I just can't wait! I'm sure that a high resolution splash screen instead of real information about the progress of the self test will boost my productivity, and reduce the total cost of ownership tremendously!

    This indicates just how desperate the industry is to keep the market from saturating.

  • Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Goronmon ( 652094 )
    What are the actual advantages to having an EFI over the BIOS? I mean, I'm all for changes that will make PC's better, but this doesn't seem like it will actually make much of a difference in the great scheme of things.

    If it can actually help when having system problems...but aside from that, would there really be any reason to switch to EFI? Wouldn't it be creating more overhead? I mean, it seems like it would be doing more than a BIOS normally would,a nd run it next to an OS will there be any performance hits?
  • SGI's first attempt at Wintel PCs, the overengineered and overdue 320 and 540, used a prom interface similar to what SGI MIPS/IRIX, Sun, and modern Apples use. There were both graphical and text/command-line interfaces available. A fellow could use this nifty maintanence system to choose the boot device, get system info, even run some diagnostics... just like a "real" workstation. Pretty neat, but probably one of the reasons that these cool machines can't run anything newer than Windows 2000.
    • Not sure how anyone would think it pretty neat - I had to use one of the 320's for a year and a half and I'm not surprised they died a horrible death. It was a strange mixture of PC and non-PC components which made it not quite an SGi and not quite a PC (even the USB slots were non-standard)! So basically it was impossible to upgrade without spending sh*tloads of cash (even the RAM was some ridiculous price to upgrade from 128M to 256M with their wierd SIMMS - and after that upgrade it was impossible to upgrade any more unless you threw out the extra 128M as all 12 slots were used!!).

      No, I think it's best to leave the OS' on the disk, and only the code that's motherboard specific on the motherboard - it just doesn't make sense to mix the two in a PC.
  • What happens if the hard drive fails? The CNet article says that the filesystem is stored on the hard drive. And how much space will the file system take up? I hope they have thought of this.

  • EFI? (Score:3, Funny)

    by A_Non_Moose ( 413034 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:52PM (#5349111) Homepage Journal
    My first thought was GRUB....and after seeing the screenshots... I think, ok "WinGRUB".
    . ;)
  • "Hello, Dell? I forgot the password to my EFI" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
  • That should be "Bios's Days Are Numbered."

  • Complexity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zelet ( 515452 )
    I don't think it is smart to add complexity to a damn near hardwired system. If there is one of the "cool" bugs found in the bios replacement how would you ever be able to fix it? This sounds somewhat dangerous to me.

  • More specifically... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:57PM (#5349146) Homepage Journal
    Bios days are in binary...

    All days are numbered, but bios is done in binary.

    (It's a vague attempt a humour... laugh.)

  • Whither OpenFirmware? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by megaduck ( 250895 ) <dvarvel@hotmaiCOLAl.com minus caffeine> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:01PM (#5349166) Journal

    Like a lot of people here, I've been wondering why Intel is trying to reinvent the wheel when OpenBoot is both flexible and reliable. It's a little intimidating for Forth newbies (like myself), but I've never had a problem with any of the Sun or Apple boxen that use OF.

    The motivation behind EFI is probably simple economics. Intel has effectively maximized their revenue from CPUs. This forces them to branch into other markets to keep the profits growing and the stockholders happy. By improving on the BIOS they make a more compelling case for Intel chipsets, especially in the highly profitable server arena.

    OpenFirmware is an open standard, so other chipset vendors could implement their own OF solutions without ever paying a dime to Intel. EFI is probably patent encumbered and represents a nice opportunity to collect fat license checks from companies like VIA and ServerWorks. Also, MS has demonstrated how profitable controlling a platform can be. Intel's probably trying to extend their strong processor position so that they have more control over your computer. OF is, well, open. That makes it kind of suck as a monopoly extension tool.

    That's what I've come up with, anyways. If anyone's got a better theory please share.

  • 1) Log it somewhere only accessable through an obscure state-of-the-industry key sequence held at boot (I propose ctrl-Alt-~-F5-j-F9-q-}(yes, with all the shifts)-\).

    2) Make it post so damn fast that nobody even notices
  • "Because it gives a new level of control over the hardware, it's also of interest to digital rights management and security designers."

    So basically what we have here is combined BIOS/Boot track that Turbo Tax has explicit *permission* to write to, but perhaps you don't?

    Oh, gee, goody. Just what I had asked Santa for.

    KFG

  • From what I read, this is NOT the answer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WhaDaYaKnow ( 563683 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:38PM (#5349342)
    First of all, I'll link to my post [slashdot.org] two days ago.

    Intel however, doesn't seem to quite understand the issue. I mean, EFI is partially stored on the hardrive?! Sounds to me they are making things more complex, instead of less.

    The quote " In effect, it's a tiny operating system in its own right," scares the shit out of me.

    And all this hype about graphics, I mean, come on. I wrote a boot loader in 64K that booted straight into true color, 800x600 graphics mode, including a compressable image. It's not a big deal. And of course "With the BIOS, that's limited to VGA or worse" is horseshit, the BIOS can use the VESA BIOS to switch to any mode it desires. This is all a non-issue. It's been solved.

    Yes, network diagnostics is good. But I'd rather have a secure network boot, because then I can do anything, including loading a remote OS even though the harddrive shat on itself.

    The BIOS is the last place on the PC where people have to write in low-level assembler code, and we want to end that" he said. Instead, EFI is almost entirely written in C,

    Bullshit, there are BIOSs that are written in C. Actually, my bootloader is written in C++. There.

    so if your OS freezes you can go in and look at the state of the machine, change configuration, load a different driver, and do a sensible restart

    Yeah right, I can totally see my mom do that. I've spent hours trying to get Windows XP Embedded to NOT probe a secondary IDE channel because it was not terminated correctly and would hang the boot, using the kernel debugger and all. Never got it to work. And this is going to all work just like that?

    Finally, it can pretend to be a BIOS. "We're not expecting people to throw out the BIOS overnight, so EFI can support legacy systems by running on top of an existing BIOS and handing over control when appropriate."

    Ah! I was wondering where that backwards compatibility was. I'm so happy that we are moving one step forwards and two steps back.

    Yep, this probably sounds a flamebait, a silly rant, whatever. There's some good ideas there, but I don't think they are on the right track...

    At the end of the day, the BIOS (boot loader) should be in Flash (ROM) so that it still works even if there's no harddrive. It should get the hell done with all hardware initialization and boot the frigin OS. Putting more complexity in the BIOS means more bugs, means more updates, means more security risks.

  • VGA text mode is a waste of circuitry (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @11:00PM (#5349757)
    Speaning as someone who has designed a graphics accelerator chip, I can say that having to include a VGA controller is a total waste of design effort and circuit area. It's useful ONLY for boot-up on PC's, and then as soon as a real OS comes up, it's turned off and forgotten about. It's a pointless anoyance, and I'll be elated to see it go away.
    • Speaking as someone who has designed a graphics accelerator chip, I can say that having to include a VGA controller is a total waste of design effort and circuit area. It's useful ONLY for boot-up on PC's, and then as soon as a real OS comes up, it's turned off and forgotten about. It's a pointless anoyance, and I'll be elated to see it go away.

      Legacy is a bitch, isn't it? :)

      Seriously, unless there is a sane and universally accepted standard out there that can replace VGA/VESA it has to stay. Too much use it for it to be removed - like the BIOS, boot-loaders, MS-DOS and Linux in text mode. I do not want to wait for the OS to load the correct video driver before the machine is able to display something. There are way too many SNAFUs that can happen before a video driver can be loaded, and if that happens the PC is toast unless the BIOS has proper support for a serial console or boot control over the network.

      Does the VGA requirement hold back the development of new graphics chips? I would assume that it is a well understood problem that can be implemented in a small separate space and doesn't impact the design of the rest of the chip. If that is an incorrect assumption, please explain.

      Yes, it is a legacy annoyance. Yes, it would be great if we could replace it with something better.

  • The BIOS is the device driver for the motherboard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @11:09PM (#5349790)
    The BIOS acts as the the device driver for the motherboard. There is no standard for several of the devices on the motherboard, so the BIOS needs to provide the interfaces. That's why we have stuff like APM and ACPI.

    The reason why BIOS exists as it does today is because motherboard manufacturers wanted to add features that the major OS's were not supporting. For example, system sleep on laptops running Windows NT. NT doesn't support that, so the BIOS was updated to do the work "under the covers". Another example is USB keyboard support. In order to have your USB keyboard work in DOS or any other legacy OS, the BIOS has a USB driver built-in that translates USB keyboard events to PS/2 keyboard commands. The OS has no idea what's going on.

    All of this could have been avoided if BIOS developers weren't so goddamn lazy. I used to be one, and my co-workers were experts at hacking up the BIOS code so that it would just barely work for whatever new feature they needed to add. The last thing they were going to do is redesign anything so that it made sense. Half of the code hadn't been touched in 10 years, and there was no one left who understand it anyway.

    I hear Dell is planning on laying off all their BIOS developers and moving everything to China. I can't wait until some huge customer calls because they have some obscure hardware from the 90's that won't work in their Itanium box, and the problem won't get fixed because they don't have anyone left who knows what they're doing.

  • Who are they kidding? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @11:22PM (#5349872) Homepage
    Okay, we've been trying to get rid of the damned floppy for how long? Five years? And it's still a fundamental requirement for updating most BIOS's?

    How long did it take to put the ISA bus to bed after PCI came out? Ten years?

    I'd love to see the BIOS go away as much as anyone, but I just don't see this happening in a reasonable amount of time. It's just too firmly entrenched in every PC, add-in card, and software doo-dad to easily do away with. And I don't care how good the "legacy" support is, I'm sure it will not work more frequently than it does work.

    Then again, I am a cynic, although you'd never know it.

  • About time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PotatoHead ( 12771 ) <doug.opengeek@org> on Friday February 21, 2003 @02:25AM (#5350686) Homepage Journal
    The current boot process sucks.

    SGI has been doing this right for years. Their PROM is network aware, can run basic diagnostics, uses a gui and just looks damn cool.

    Much better to see "Welcome to Octane" than Beep Chuga Chuga.... Post complete Memtest and other garbage.

    Lets just hope the process remains open enough to allow Open Code.

  • Misleading statement about no text-only (Score:5, Informative)

    by RockyMountain ( 12635 ) on Friday February 21, 2003 @03:20AM (#5350832) Homepage
    EFI my be a new thing to most IA-32 users, but it's already the established standard for IA-64 firmware. So, I have hands on experience using it.

    I beleive the statement about getting rid of text-mode-only startup is incorrect. I've used EFI extensively in systems that don't even have a graphics card installed, and it works just fine over a serial console.

    EFI is like a little mini-OS that serves mainly as a boot loader environment, but can also be used for running simple batch scripts and executables. System configuration utilities, OS installers, and diagnostic programs are all good candidates to build as EFI executables. For example, "elilo" is a Linux boot loader built as an EFI executable. To me, EFI seems more like MS-DOS than anything else.

    EFI has modular drivers, so you can support different boot devices, network stacks, etc., and use them for pre-OS-boot tasks such as installation, configuration, etc.

    Since EFI can mount (some) filesystems, and the booted OS can subsequently mount the same filesystem, an EFI partition is a useful place. For example, when you build a new linux kernel, you just copy it into the mounted EFI partition, modify the elilo.conf file (also in this partition), and the next boot will boot from the new file. No more scribbling to boot records.

  • Same thing, different names (Score:5, Informative)

    by vrmlguy ( 120854 ) <samwyse@nOSPAM.gmail.com> on Friday February 21, 2003 @08:31AM (#5351685) Homepage Journal
    It looks to me like Phoenix and Intel are doing the same thing here, only Phoenix (being "the BIOS company") wants to call it an expanded BIOS while Intel (being "the CPU company") wants to call something else. Both want to add a TCP/IP stack, graphics and other fun things to what is essentially a bootstrap loaded.

    OpenBoot/OpenFirmware has had similar abilities for some time. Your CPU boots up a Forth interpreter, which then goes looking for programs to run. Expansion cards are one place to look, so that video and network adaptors can be used before the OS loads.

    This is important, so pay close attention. The interpreter will run Forth code found on an expansion card. This means that you can use the same card in a computer whose CPU is from Intel, MIPS, Alpha, etc. The initial code will define Forth subroutines that allow the bootstrap loader to use the card. For example, a video card will define subroutines for CURSES-like functions, the boot loader will then call those routines to interact with the user. It's written in an interpreted language, so it'll be slow, but the OS won't have to use those routines, it will use drivers loaded from disk. On the other hand, the OS can use the Forth routines if it can't find a driver, allowing cards to be useful before you install the correct drivers.

    It's a great idea whose time came over a decade ago. Too bad Intel and Phoenix never got on the bandwagon.

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