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Intel

Intro To Intel's Next-Gen BIOS Architecture 36

Posted by timothy from the redefining-basic dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article introduces the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is intended to provide an alternative to BIOS that will allow for faster booting, manageability, and additional features. According to the author, there has been rapid evolution of the personal computer platform since the 1980s. These advances have included order-of-magnitude increases in performance, ease-of-use, storage capacity, and connectivity. But there is one element of the PC that has not changed for the past 23 years -- namely, the BIOS (basic input/output system)."
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Intro To Intel's Next-Gen BIOS Architecture More

Intro To Intel's Next-Gen BIOS Architecture

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  • Why is that bad? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @10:50PM (#8176594)
    The awesome backward compatibility of the PC architecture is one of the main reasons it's the most popular personal computer platform. Besides, there have been tons of advances in BIOS technology over the past 20 years. Sure, the basics are still in there, but even 5 years ago you couldn't boot off a USB key fob or even over the network (PXE) on most motherboards. 10 years ago power management was basically non-existent and things like ACPI and APIC were years away. Extend, don't just throw it away. If you're going to get rid of it then at least adopt Openboot firmware like Macs and Suns have.

  • progress? (Score:5, Funny)

    by prof187 ( 235849 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @10:51PM (#8176596) Homepage
    According to the author, there has been rapid evolution of the personal computer platform since the 1980s

    What?! When did this happen and why wasn't I told? Time to trade in the vacuum tubes

    • Re:progress? (Score:4, Funny)

      by djdanlib ( 732853 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @06:11AM (#8178318) Homepage
      You had vacuum tubes? Back in my day, we didn't have electricity. We had to use colored rocks, and those were hard to find because the world was in black and white, and sometimes one of us would get eaten by a mountain lion! And we were thankful!
  • Who the hell cares? Even with Windows, I'm up and running in under a minute, and besides, who turns off their computer anymore?

    • Re:Faster Booting? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Skyfire ( 43587 )
      If you are running a server, and have a restart (due to failure, new kernel, or whatever) you want to be able restart as fast possible to minimize downtime.
      • You know what I've noticed on that? It's not the PC bios but the damn SCSI bios that takes the longest time during startup on our servers. I'm not really a hardware guy, and I don't know if that's normal or not, but these are mostly fairly new Dells.
    • Even with Windows, I'm up and running in under a minute

      When I was a lad, we had computers which would boot instantaneously.

  • Boo... Hiss... (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by nathanh ( 1214 )
    Just do Open Firmware you stupid NIH Intelidiots.

  • Mama told me only buy 100% IBM compatible (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @11:43PM (#8176886) Homepage
    Otherwise you have to patch Lotus 1-2-3 to make it work.

    Seriously though, it seemed to me that at first this should break backward compatability but why couldn't BIOS emulation be plugged in as an EFI driver? All it has to do is provide the same software interrupts and it wouldn't even have to be loaded unless your OS needs BIOS to boot. Just because this "framework" isn't natively backwards compatible doesn't mean it couldn't be made backwards compatible.

    • Re:Mama told me only buy 100% IBM compatible (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @12:43AM (#8177277)
      RTFA -- it will emulate the PC BIOS (see figure 3).
      • Ok. I went back and carefully re-read above figure 3 and re-read below figure 3. I searched the article for "emulate" and for "compat". I studied figure 3 in great detail. I even unfocused my eyes and tried to look *into* figure 3. ...No joy.

        Apparently all an anonymous troll must do to whore karma is to tell someone else to to RTFA and pretend to point them to the right spot. And since the moderators don't bother to look... TADA! +5 informative. Sheesh.
        • I studied figure 3 in great detail. I even unfocused my eyes and tried to look *into* figure 3. ...No joy.

          Really? Figure 3 has a black box that says "Compatibility Support Module". And then a blue box on top of that saying "Legacy OS Loader". And then the text above the figure says "In addition, the Framework provides support for legacy OS interfaces via a set of drivers."

          I think that's you're looking for? That Compatibility Support Module must be a BIOS emulation layer.

  • Surely this brings DRM to life (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @12:01AM (#8176998) Homepage
    It strikes me that losing the hardware BIOS will almost certainly lead to some kind of DRM scheme - probably hardware related - that can't be bypassed by something like a boot floppy.

    In fact, I really can't believe that DRM won't be built into whatever replaces the BIOS chip.

    Course maybe I'm i'm just paranoid...

  • Some thoughts... (Score:3, Informative)

    by notsoclever ( 748131 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @02:29AM (#8177737) Journal
    Okay, so EFI can emulate standard BIOS through a module. Which means that it can also obviously emulate OpenFirmware.

    Since OpenFirmware is also totally programmable, does that mean that OF could emulate EFI?

    It'd be interesting to see if future video cards decided to support EFI instead of x86-specific BIOS code. One of the big problems with getting video cards on the Mac is that they use x86 BIOS code which means that vendors need to make two versions, one PC and one OpenFirmware, and since the PC market is so much bigger the OpenFirmware version is usually 2-3x as expensive (and because of the development effort in making the OpenFirmware version, ATI et al do whatever they can to prevent people from just flashing the x86 version of the card with the OpenFirmware firmware).

    It sure would be nice to not have to pay $200 for the Mac version of a $75 Radeon...

  • We don't need faster booting, everyone turns on their computer, and then goes for coffee like a zombie.
  • and "It should be noted that each phase builds upon the other.", but the first phase they mention is PEI...

    Intel mentions (about the "Security" phase) here [intel.com] that:

    The objective is to ensure that the first code executed by the processor is trustworthy and that this code has sufficient resources in and of itself to determine the trustworthiness of any subsequent code. What "authenticate" and "trustworthy" mean can evolve over time and across platforms

    Trustworthy [slashdot.org] computing [slashdot.org] anyone?

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