The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 12, 2011 8:19 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

> And so for the want of a new partition table standard, EFI arrived in the PC world.

I think that is far from having been the only reason (maybe I just missed the smiley?)

BIOS implementations are all proprietary assembly code. EFI is at least 95% open-source C.

> It's the chipset-level secret sauce that knows how to turn a system without working RAM into a system with working RAM, which is a fine and worthy achievement but not typically something an OS needs to care about.

Note that initializing memory has become incredibly complex.

> [2] To be fair to Intel, choosing to have drivers be written in C rather than Forth probably did make EFI more attractive to third party developers than Open Firmware

EFI also supports byte code applications and drivers for obvious portability reasons.

> There's nothing standing between EFI and EMACS except a C library and a port of readline.

I think EFI cannot send email yet, but that will come eventually.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 17, 2011 16:29 UTC (Wed) by xilun (guest, #50638) [Link] (2 responses)

"EFI is at least 95% open-source C."

The open source part (EDK/EDK2) does only contains very abstracted software infrastructure, arguably quite badly designed (e.g. you can see the hand of the psychopaths of MS putting GUID everywhere even and especially where it does not make any beginning of sense). I don't see why anybody would want to write programs for that environment.

What could be interesting to take for something which has the actual intent of booting a computer, like coreboot+its various payloads, instead of merely providing an ms-dos like os where linking is done by guid and the whole thing is burned down on your motherboard, is not open source at all. Depending on the cpu and chipset vendor, there are not even public datasheet for booting your chips.

The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 17, 2011 16:43 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

You are basically whining that EFI's core is not licensed under the GPL but BSD. This is correct.

> ... is not open source at all

Still whining but plain wrong as anyone can see.

> Depending on the cpu and chipset vendor,...

Usual and well-known consequence of a BSD license.

PS: we miss your fair comparison with older BIOSes.

The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 18, 2011 21:24 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

OpenBIOS is a fairly decent open-source BIOS replacement. My biggest gripe with OpenBIOS is they dumped the Forth interpreter support. Very low level interfaces are exactly what you want for diagnostics, for example, where an OS would just get in the way.