News Someone made a functioning IRC client that runs entirely inside the motherboard's UEFI

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The original writeup includes some very nice graphics and lots of details about various technical aspects of working in a pre-boot environment. Worth a look!

What I find mystifying about both this article, and I think it goes back to the original author talking about it being "in your motherboard", is that the program does seem to run on your main CPU. The only part that's potentially "on your motherboard" would be if you burn the image into the boot ROM. However, I'm pretty sure UEFI can also run extensions off a special partition in your boot drive, which I'm guessing is probably how he developed & tested it.
 
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bit_user said:
The original writeup includes some very nice graphics and lots of details about various technical aspects of working in a pre-boot environment. Worth a look!
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What I find mystifying about both this article, and I think it goes back to the original author talking about it being "in your motherboard", is that the program does seem to run on your main CPU. The only part that's potentially "on your motherboard" would be if you burn the image into the boot ROM. However, I'm pretty sure UEFI can also run extensions off a special partition in your boot drive, which I'm guessing is probably how he developed & tested it.
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Hello, author of the original article here! This is a great question, and I apologise for the confusion! You're correct that this program runs on the 'BSP' (or 'bootstrap processor', a technical term that is basically equivalent to 'main CPU'). When I say 'in your motherboard', I'm basically trying to be pithy: you're absolutely right that this program is not actually stored in the motherboard. The UEFI firmware itself *is* stored in the motherboard's ROM, and it then loads the bootloader (or UEFIRC, or whatever) from the EFI partition on the connected hard drive.
 
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philliptennen said:
Hello, author of the original article here! This is a great question, and I apologise for the confusion! You're correct that this program runs on the 'BSP' (or 'bootstrap processor', a technical term that is basically equivalent to 'main CPU'). When I say 'in your motherboard', I'm basically trying to be pithy: you're absolutely right that this program is not actually stored in the motherboard. The UEFI firmware itself *is* stored in the motherboard's ROM, and it then loads the bootloader (or UEFIRC, or whatever) from the EFI partition on the connected hard drive.
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Why not just make an uefirc.efi executable which all of us can run when we boot from UEFI shell?
 
USAFRet said:
The next question is...why would one want to do that?

From the UEFI, the only thing you wish to run is an IRC client?
Welcome to last century.
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It would probably help if you'd look at the original blog post. I think the point was more to explore UEFI development in Rust, including network and GUI programming within it. It's just a vehicle for that purpose.

Also, this:

"The IRC client itself, as a client, isn’t that usable because this project is an elaborate joke*."
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I like how the article points to a helpful link that explains what UEFI is. But not what IRC is. 😀

I have used IRC as recently as a few years ago. It was Discord that finally pushed it into the abyss. And the freenode thing.
 
I conducted a study on IRC back in the early 1990's while at grad school, at the request of the faculty.

Nearly every group I queried, during the live sessions, started with these two questions?

- What sex are you?
- What are you wearing?

I focused on technical/educational topics, not the darker stuff (those areas were beyond bizarre).

I wish I was making this up. The paper and presentation was a hoot. Lots of laughs.
 
COLGeek said:
I conducted a study on IRC back in the early 1990's while at grad school, at the request of the faculty.

Nearly every group I queried, during the live sessions, started with these two questions?

- What sex are you?
- What are you wearing?

I focused on technical/educational topics, not the darker stuff (those areas were beyond bizarre).

I wish I was making this up. The paper and presentation was a hoot. Lots of laughs.
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Basement nerds, FTW!
 
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COLGeek said:
The screen captures and live sessions during the presentation were priceless.
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What's sad is... some of the chans have not changed. It was a blast 20+ years ago but these days it smells like ageing hippies, not teen spirit.

IRC is still a low bandwith, low power, communication ...thing. Dunno if Twitch still uses it, but it did some years ago. In a way it's almost cool how it refuses to die.
 
35below0 said:
I like how the article points to a helpful link that explains what UEFI is. But not what IRC is. 😀

I have used IRC as recently as a few years ago. It was Discord that finally pushed it into the abyss. And the freenode thing.
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You might want to dust off that IRC again now that Discord is going to bring the ads they said they never will.
 
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