Bye Bye BIOS, dead in 3 years

[davo]

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/6/8/exclusive-msi-bios-will-be-dead-three-years/

It's the one major part of the PC 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 that "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."

Point and click, also allowing 3T drives etc, written in C (making calls to assembly where needed) hmmm about time!

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

I knew about the 127GB limit for CHS mode, but I didn't think there would be a 2TB limit.

I do understand that some file systems like OS/2 Warp's HPFS have this limit though.

EFI also has a bonus that you don't need to worry about having that clumsy MBR + disk partition table, since it is limited to 4 primary partitions.

Also, EFI byte code can run on ANY architecture, so one boot loader suits all.

I do hope the BIOS is phased out soon.

[davo]

EFI has been around for a while, but this is talking about 'unified' ... UEFI

Yea there are 3 terabyte drives, but you can't use them :)

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Same thing though, different name, isn't it? Or is there something new?

BTW I had a look at the link... yikes! This new pimped up BIOS looks bloated as hell. Pretty much bloated enough to be an OS actually.

[TÐöer]

"Bye Bye BIOS, dead in 3 years "

But... why?

[davo]

"Bye Bye BIOS, dead in 3 years "

But... why?

Because no manufacturer will use it, 3Terabyte disks will be the norm (at least) and you can't use them on old BIOS systems.

@Croc : EFI has been around in various incarnations since the 1990's, in 2005 they formed the UEFI to bring a standard together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI_Forum

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Can you use 3TB RAID arrays though? (I never knew you can get 3TB internal single drives)

Little something about EFI though: I remember first hearing about EFI back in the Itanium systems.

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Not sure I should really be bumping this thread (well it is over 18 months old now) but I think I should point out a small change in opinion that is very relevant to this thread. I have made some unfortunately stupid remarks that imply EFI is better than BIOS and in reality, as I look at it, the opposite appears to be true.

BIOS has a major and useful advantage over EFI: it is simpler and people know how to use it.

EFI has become this complex overengineered mechanism-that-does-lots-of-shit and it is now probably possible to code an entire OS into EFI itself. That, along with the ability to access the internet via an EFI bytecode app or the shell, and of course this means some rather serious security implications.

Who could have put it better than Linus Torvalds:
EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI). It's
totally different from a normal BIOS, and was brought on by ia64, which
never had a BIOS, of course.

Sadly, Apple bought into the whole "BIOS bad, EFI good" hype, so we now
have x86 machines with EFI as the native boot protocol.

...

Sadly, EFI people
(a) think that their stinking mess is better than a BIOS and (b) are
historically ia64-only, so they didn't do that, but went the "we'll just
duplicate everything using our inferior EFI interfaces" way.
And of course...
Btw, that's not totally new. I think some people played around with EFI on
x86 even before Apple came around. And 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.

I think a lot of the "new standards" tend to be that way. Trying to solve
a lot of problems and allow everybody to add their own features, instead
of just saying that it's better to just standardize the hardware.

For example, instead of ACPI, we could just have had standardized hardware
(and a few tables to define things like numbers of CPU's etc). It would
have been simpler for everybody. But no, people seem to think that it's
somehow "better" to have wild and crazy hardware, and then have a really
complicated way of describing it - and driving it - dynamically.

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.

Not a good combination, in other words.

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.

The absolutely biggest advantage of a BIOS is that it's _so_ inconvenient
and obviously oldfashioned, that you have to be crazy to want to do
anything serious in it. Real mode, 16-bit code is actually an _advantage_
in that sense. People know how to treat it, and don't get any ideas about
it being some grandiose framework for anything else than "just load the OS
and get the hell out of there".
I also agree with him here, and his point about 16-bit real mode code not being a limitation in this application is definitely one which appears to be advantageous.

Now come to think of it I definitely think it will be dreadful when the BIOS goes... the only issue I could possibly see with it is the 2TB boot limit. Just get rid of that limitation and leave the rest alone I think... if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Oh yeah... it turns out you can use 3+ TB drives after all, but not as the primary boot device; but as some secondary/tertiary/etc drive.

[davo]

Wish you could +1 or like on the forum, rather than post, would cut down a lot of noise ;)

Good one Croc! thanks for the info!