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  • #51
    Originally posted by locovaca View Post
    Many MB manufacturers pimp their "exclusive" BIOS features.
    I never said otherwise. My point is that the "exclusive" part tends to be either built into the hardware configuration (for which the main expense is hardware, and for which the support code would be small and highly board-specific) or based on UI enhancements (which would go into the payload).

    Whether or not they are truly exclusive is another point, but if you told your president that you could switch to this fancy new system but you'd have to give away all the "exclusive" code that you wrote, who would do that?
    On what basis would the "exclusive" code would have to be given away?

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    • #52
      Originally posted by locovaca View Post
      It is, except that Coreboot has never made itself a serious alternative. As I said before, even if they magically get things working for a large number of boards, they still have to get some sort of support system in place.
      Huh? You mean like the support system put in place by Aware/phoenix/whatever? Oh wait... they have NO SUPPORT SYSTEM AT ALL, and not only that, their code is BLOB JUNK.

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      • #53
        Originally posted by droidhacker View Post
        Huh? You mean like the support system put in place by Aware/phoenix/whatever? Oh wait... they have NO SUPPORT SYSTEM AT ALL, and not only that, their code is BLOB JUNK.
        I thought he meant "support system" in a business sense for OEMs, i.e. companies that OEMs can outsource their BIOS development/QA to and/or harass/sue/etc. if something goes wrong. This sort of thing isn't totally nonexistent for coreboot (see e.g. Sage Electronic Engineering), but the market does appear to be much more developed for PhoenixBIOS and the like.

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        • #54
          Most of the features of a modern BIOS are useless* anyways.

          I for one will not miss 16-bit Kruft mode VGA text based, Ill thought out buggy BIOS's with NO hope of anyone EVER updating again.

          It would be nice to be able to adjust usually 'hidden' subsystems (ACPI, System Management Mode, ect...).

          Better fan PWM control, suspend states that work better, fixes and workarounds for buggy hardware/firmware.

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          • #55
            Coreboot is open-source. You can change whatever you want and there are already quite some motherboards with Coreboot support.

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            • #56
              I think Coreboot will come to prominence as people/OEM's realize what uEFI really means.

              Total abandonment of 'legacy' hardware AND software!

              Think about it:

              If you have a server, odds are, you are using one of the below:

              Gigabit NIC, SAS RAID/HBA, Fiberchannel Controller

              -Can't PXE boot without the NIC being supported in the new EFI firmware!
              -Can't Boot OS from Raid Card without the controller's BIOS extensions!
              -Can't do.... several of the above without FC Controller's BIOS extensions either!

              I've realized uEFI will just make the same (or worse) mistakes than the original real-mode x86 BIOS,
              vendors will never make the effort to improve it - other than to add marketing chrome or shiny bling
              (which is generally consumer grade garbage-ware).

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              • #57
                Originally posted by locovaca View Post
                It takes 8 minutes from password entry to a workable desktop.
                But you have to admit that this is a nice feature to have, which is why RHEL has copied it for 6.x. 10 minutes from power button to a functioning desktop gives you an extra break in the morning, right when you need it most.

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                • #58
                  Originally posted by locovaca View Post
                  It's a chicken and egg problem.
                  No, it's a catch-22.

                  Considder evolution, where you draw the line between species based on DNA. At some point one declares "From this DNA on, it's a chicken.". Given that a chicken grows from an egg; the egg was there first.

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                  • #59
                    Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
                    Given that a chicken grows from an egg; the egg was there first.
                    That assumes that the first chicken hatched from an egg. If it in fact was the result of a mutation of an animal which didn't hatch from an egg, then it could be said that the chicken came first. I find that unlikely though; for that to have happened, the chicken's ancestor would have to had not hatched from an egg. I suspect that is not the case, but I don't know for sure. :/

                    I agree that it's a catch 22.
                    Last edited by Nobu; 24 December 2011, 07:28 PM.

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                    • #60
                      Most of the features of a modern BIOS are useless* anyways.

                      BIOS companies, universally, produce nothing but shit. BIOS are horrible programs. Bloated, terribly written, slow, unreliable, and cause all sorts of horrible problems with Linux. Nothing but shit. Almost every single one.

                      EFI is going to be better... but it's terribly designed. Over engineered horrific mismatch of 'this sounds cool' design-by-committee mishmash. A terrible abortion brought to you by megalomanics from from Intel and Microsoft.

                      EFI
                      * Has it's own shell.
                      * Requires a built-in EBC interpreter

                      If that gives you any idea of it.

                      It's like ACPI, except much more.

                      What we really want is our operating system to control the hardware. No matter what EFI or BIOS does to setup the hardware it will have to be re-done by the kernel anyways. In fact it makes things worse because not only you have to setup the hardware correctly, you have to figure out in what stupid brain-dead thing the BIOS did to break it.

                      Coreboot has the advantage that you by-pass all that stuff and just have Linux configure it the way it should be right off the bat. Linux needs to work on the hardware anyways. So getting Linux to work means that you are getting Coreboot to work.

                      For systems that want to still see a BIOS coreboot can throw a fake one at them, like SeaBIOS.

                      Unfortunately the worst thing against Coreboot is that it's not going to be liked by Microsoft and friends. So always using Coreboot means extra work.

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