News UEFI will kill the BIOS... eventually

[kenco_uk]

May be easier to catch a virus, being in c/c++. I'd stick to assembly language, in all honesty - less bloaty, purer (hitting the hardware directly), not lazily programmed.

[r4tch3t]

So if its in a higher language, even C/C++/C# then we could be getting custom BI.. UEFI's from the master coders and overclockers
Does it decrease boot times though? Now that would be a good thing.

[Bluephoenix]

and now we need a new word to refer to the pre-boot sequence as BIOS is no longer accurate...

[TMM]

Great, a shiny GUI and more things that can go wrong.

The instability of many modern motherboards is mostly due to BIOS problems, and quite a few people, including ourselves, regularly complain about the state of motherboards recently released on the market.

It won't help people who have their memory timings set too tight for their memory/board/cpu, which is the number 1 cause of stability problems.

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by TMM

It won't help people who have their memory timings set too tight for their memory/board/cpu, which is the number 1 cause of stability problems.

Nope, this is negating additional user error. It's the cause of the first lot of BIOS' have just been utterly shite.

We see it time and again from virtually every manufacturer and we basically end up their free debuggers.

[yakyb]

i love clunky bioses and i love the blue background, i hate filling in webforms which is what the screens looked like but at the end of the day progress is always good i just hope things are as simple to turn on and off as previous.

[kosch]

Thanks for the article makes some interesting reading.

I'm hope they will get to include some sort of online help in the BIOS so you can remember what each settings is meant to do rather than "This settings enables the xyz option" what is xyz!!

I'm always having to look stuff up, memory like a sieve!

[Woodstock]

Originally Posted by kosch

Thanks for the article makes some interesting reading.

I'm hope they will get to include some sort of online help in the BIOS so you can remember what each settings is meant to do rather than "This settings enables the xyz option" what is xyz!!

I'm always having to look stuff up, memory like a sieve!

DFI boards are known to have that effect

but who really needs/wants a fancy place to oc, unless it brings something more then "eye-candy" to the end user, who would really care

[DarkLord7854]

I just want something that works o.o

[Splynncryth]

Originally Posted by Bluephoenix

and now we need a new word to refer to the pre-boot sequence as BIOS is no longer accurate...

To be overly technical, in Tiano, you have the sec core, PEI, and DXE as the preboot sequence

I agree that BIOS is no longer accurate, and the replacement term I have been hearing is 'system firmware'.

[TMM]

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

Nope, this is negating additional user error. It's the cause of the first lot of BIOS' have just been utterly shite.

We see it time and again from virtually every manufacturer and we basically end up their free debuggers.

Fair enough, but how will UEFI avoid this problem? Seems to do the same thing as the bios but with higher level coding and fancy graphics - it'll still have bugs like the current bioses. If anything bugs can be fixed faster, but it won't avoid them in the first place.

As for the first bioses being crap, and having bad overclocking performance/stability - its still usually actually caused by timings - ones that the user doesn't have access to. If you look around at modded bioses all thats usually done is that some hidden timings are loosened to help stability when the FSB and/or memory is pushed way beyond stock, or a few voltage options have been enabled so the user can select a higher voltage.
Boards like DFI's Lanparty series are usually immune to problems like this from the start since DFI open up all the timing options to the user, so its a simple case off loosening off the offending timings. There is no doubt however that they face other issues (especially boards randomly deciding the give the CPU 3v for no reason when a certain combination of settings is used, rofl!)

on another note i thought this screenshot was pretty funny. Who would seriously want to disable their USB ports and PCI-e ports

[quack]

Someone who doesn't need them?

[Splynncryth]

I’ll bet the options you see are there only because the chipset can support those options.
They can also be useful if you need to eliminate hardware from a system without physically removing it which may be very difficult in some situations.

To address the debugging, I need to present a little background on both BIOS and EFI.
Ancient history is that the first x86 CPUs could only address 640K of RAM. But that was later changed and they had 1 meg of address space. Of that address space, the BIOS was given the first 1024 bytes for the interrupt vector table, 255 bytes in the bios data area, and the F000 segment which is 64K. The IVT can’t be used for data, the CPU needs that, and the BDA is not that large as well as having a defined structure. The 64K F000 segment is smaller that just about every flash part used for BIOS on modern mainboards. There are a few more tricks the BIOS has, like using the E000 segment, extended BIOS data area, and being able to set out a few regions in memory as reserved via the e820 memory map table. But we are still stuck with the old rules, and they are getting tougher to work within. Yes, it can probably be stretched, but each new challenge is making the code harder to maintain, and more complex. There are a bunch more legacy issues to deal with as well, but this is already getting pretty long.

UEFI scraps a lot of the legacy in BIOS. The first thing is that, for an x86 system, it runs in protected mode giving us 4 gig of memory address space for both code and data. (The flat mode employed by BIOS only allows data above 1 meg unless you count running in SMM). This allows for much larger programs that can do more ‘stuff’ if need be, like error checking, alternative hardware initialization paths and so on. Another feature that helps ease of development is the extremely modular system UEFI is designed around.
Whereas BIOS was essentially a linear execution of assembly code (which is why post codes are so helpful in finding issues), UEFI consist of a core ‘dispatcher’ and modules typically called drivers except for some special cases. These drivers are self contained bits of code that can reside anywhere in memory during its lifetime. So a UEFI build could have a SATA driver for one chipset that has had all the bugs worked out of it. When an updated chipset comes out that has the same SATA controller on it, this code can be reused. There is a means for a driver to use features of another driver which is called a protocol. A protocol is simply a C structure with data elements and function pointers. By narrowly defining a communications system between drivers, it cuts down on bad interactions and helps narrow down where to look for problems. But it is important to understand that UEFI is the new kid on the block and learning to work with it will take time.

[Aankhen]

Cheers Splynncryth, that was très bon. It's good to know we're finally starting to push past ancient limitations and really make use of the power available to us. UEFI all the way!

[riluve]

Originally Posted by Splynncryth

I’ll bet the options you see are there only because the chipset can support those options.
They can also be useful if you need to eliminate hardware from a system without physically removing it which may be very difficult in some situations. . .

Haha - I know who you are just by reading 2 of your posts. Unless I am mistaken, you can identify me I am sure by my Avatar. Stop in and see me in my lab before 2pm, I have meetings after that.

[Cthippo]

Dude, check the thread date. That post was made in April of LAST YEAR!

[riluve]

Originally Posted by Cthippo

Dude, check the thread date. That post was made in April of LAST YEAR!

No but seriously - the thread came up in a google search that I did and think about it - of all the millions of people online - imagine, I seriously read 2 posts and new immediately the person who wrote the posts. It was kinda freaky - I had no idea he had been posting in this forum.


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