On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Polytropon <free...@edvax.de> wrote: > On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:38:48 +0100 (BST), Anton Shterenlikht wrote: >> Anyway, I think I've heard there are some laptops >> with no BIOS, is this true? > > Per termini technici, yes. > > Some systems use EFI (or UEFI) instead of a BIOS. It's > comparable to a much more advanced (than BIOS) micro-OS > that initializes the hardware, connectes to the Internet, > tells the manufacturer what you're doing and keeps limiting > you in what you are allowed to install. :-)
Heh... ;-) (U)EFI is nothing new for us old farts: we've had OpenBoot[1] on Sun hardware for ages, and even though it didn't limit us w.r.t. the OS you wanted to boot (that's why you can install FreeBSD/sparc64 on used Sun machines), it had its issues too. Mainly that it needed a counter-part in hardware peripherals. E.g.: without F-Code in ROM, a PCI-based frame buffer wouldn't be usable there, because it wouldn't reply to the OpenBoot queries. The point is that firmware CAN be a mini-OS and more powerful than PC-BIOS. There's nothing wrong with that, and the flexibility of OFW/OpenBoot was for us sysadmins invaluable, esp. with diskless machines. What's wrong, is UEFI's DRM-scheme used to prevent non-signed code to be loaded... without mandating in the specs that the BIOS vendor MUST allow the device owner to add his/her own keys to it. That's the evil part of it. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware -cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
