> Mike Smith wrote:
> >
> > > > I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
> > > > months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
> > > > well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
> > > > results pretty representative of the issue.
> > >
> > > Maybe I'm completely mistunderstanding the subject, but
> > > what about EFI (Extendable Firmware Interface) ? It's the
> > > new Intel's proposal for BIOS. It's the only thing that will
> > > be (and is) on IA-64, and also will be retrofitted on the
> > > 32-bit machines. It's a very flexible thing including extensive
> > > API, OS-independent loadable drivers, networking, serial console, etc.
> > > I'm in progress of reading the specs (avaliable from the Intel's
> > > developer web site), so I don't know more detail yet. The spec says
> > > that the full source code of reference implementation is available
> > > for free. By the way, they used FreeBSD as the base of their EFI
> > > API implementation (libc, networking and other).
> >
> > It's still entirely useless without the _board_specific_ initialisation
> > code, which vendors typically aren't going to just hand out.
>
> Right, but why would you want to replace the existing BIOS ?
That's more or less my point - I think the only argument for it so far is
sheer masochism. 8)
> > The real issue with replacing a system's BIOS is not the top layer
> > (services etc.), it's initialisation and random magic that is entirely
> > specific to the board's actual implementation details.
>
> I think it depends mostly on the chipset used, hardly the board
> manufacturers add much or anything at all. And there are not that
> many modern chipsets on the market, and seems like their number
> is reducing over time as Intel gets more involved.
Actually, general experience suggests that's not the case at all.
--
\\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith
\\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
\\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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