NEWZ: Extensible Firmware Set To Kill Off BIOS

[Corvair]

On occasion around here, I've mentioned Itanium machinery's use of Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), and how EFI will eventually replace BIOS on the X86 platform. (Note: The first generation of Itanium boxes did use BIOS for a short while, but EFI was quickly shuffled into place in less than a year). Well, we're *finally* seeing some action on this front!

The X86 "PC" platform has evolved greatly since its inception. The XT/AT bus is gone, floppy drives are essentially gone, parallel and RS-232 serial ports are as good as gone, massive evolution has taken place with graphics, and so forth, but the stupid BIOS and its specifications from about the IBM AT days is still very much with us.

EFI will offer many new capabilities, one of which is the ability to do a wide range of diagnostics without booting into an operating system and running a utility, much in the same way that you can currently perform a low-level format of a SCSI hard drive by running the embedded formatting program that's stored in the SCSI host bus adapter's PROM.



Newz:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39210818,00.htm

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface website:
http://www.uefi.org/index.asp

 

[ddrueding]

If this will do what I want it to, I can say goodbye to acronis trueimage.

 

[Buck]

Adios Tonto and the horse you rode in on.

 

[Corvair]

If this will do what I want it to, I can say goodbye to acronis trueimage.

And more.

Depending on the computer (or mobo) you buy -- as in how "fancy" it is-- you'll be able to various maintenance operations to hardware or the operating system load, without actually booting into the operating system.

In a Microsoft-oriented shop, a mobo with licensed "Microsoft options" firmware added could allow you to perform operations to the Windows registry, or to the file system, or allow you to replace or rollback a bad system driver without booting into Windows Safe Mode (if it would boot at all).

This would be just the beginning.