Will BIOS Be Dead in 3 Years?

[saravis4]

This link has a good FAQ for those curious about UEFI:
http://www.uefi.org/about/

There is one question that is related to this article:

Q: Does UEFI completely replace a PC BIOS?

A: No. While UEFI uses a different interface for "boot services" and "runtime services", some platform firmware must perform the functions BIOS uses for system configuration (a.k.a. "Power On Self Test" or "POST") and Setup. UEFI does not specify how POST & Setup are implemented.

It seems to me that the authors of the specification itself don't even think that the BIOS is going to be completely dead anytime soon. This doesn't give MSI much credibility in what they're claiming.

 

[yo_yo2400]

Wont making bio's nice and flashy just make noobs play with them? Go broken computers!

 

[JonnyDough]

[citation][nom]Computerrock1[/nom]Go BIOS! I fear that I will lose fine tuning ability with something like this.[/citation]

I understand. However, you won't really need fine tuning of your specific hardware when it runs almost at the speed of light. Maybe you didn't notice but there's little difference between an overclocked Core i7 and one that is running at stock for most of the programs you're using today. Computers are well on their way to reaching the point of "no-wait computation" for most people who aren't doing industrial work. When is the last time you waited more than a second for a webpage on a speedy PC with blazing fast internet access? Modern PC hardware really isn't usually the bottleneck these days. Internet speeds and latency are. Thankfully, it will be awhile before cloud computing really takes hold - although due to a total lack of privacy and security I hope it never does. Skye-net is not your friend.

 

[wayneepalmer]

Maybe this was what ASUS was thinking about when they put that little SSD drive directly on the P6X58D motherboard.

Right now it has a mini OS in it that does basic operations outside of Windows (it boots in about 5 seconds).

I wonder if they were anticipating the need for more capacity for the UEFI?

 

[hawkwindeb]

[citation][nom]afrobacon[/nom]Looks like I'll wait a little longer before I upgrade the ol' TRS-80[/citation]
I'm with ya bro, I'm waiting for the next generation to upgrade my Altair 8800.... I'm just so tired if flipping all those switches just to play a game... It's like trying to get on a fast moving merry-go-round when I was a kid and thinking I'll just wait until it slows down a little before I jump on. So Ive thought of the computer industry.. I mean really, who needs more than 8K - anyway what would you do with all that extra memory ;-)

 

[techguy378]

[citation][nom]killerb255[/nom]If you all want an example of an EFI, look no further than a recent MacBook.[/citation]
Intel Mac's don't follow the industry standard UEFI spec like off the shelf Windows PC's do. If they did then it would be possible to install 64-bit Windows 7 without the need for a BIOS compatibility module.

 

[bochica]

As long as we can still overclock our components and shut off other features that we don't or will never use, I would not miss the BIOS.

 

[g00ey]

[citation][nom]drwho1[/nom]So the whole issue is not been able to BOOT from a 2TB or greater drive?who cares!as long as I can access thid drives as data/multimedia drives.I got 2 2TB working just fine (not as boot drives) just for storage.[/citation]

Well, if you want to upgrade to future versions of Windows 2TB as a boot partition will not be enough.

 

[ready4dis]

[citation][nom]kelemvor4[/nom]Hogwash.BIOS uses Master Boot Records (MBR) to boot from a drive. The MBR is 512 bytes of which 64 bytes is the partition table, 16 bytes to fully describe each partition's attributes, so you only have 8 bytes to point at each partition's location and size. Only 4 bytes of that can be used to point at each partition's beginning sector. Four bytes is 32 bits, so you can address 2**32 sectors and (2**32)*512 bytes (since there are 512 bytes/sector) = 2.2 E12 or about 2 TB (maximum addressable disk size and also partition size since 4 bytes is also allowed to describe each partition's size with BIOS and MBR).It's a very cut and dry 2TB limitation baked into BIOS. I discovered this rather painfully with my last build when I tried to use a single 6Tb array. Quite disappointing.Now once you have booted from a 2TB or smaller partition using windows/macos/linux/name your bootloader you can use software to mount a GPT partition that exceeds 2Tb. You still cannot boot from a partition greater than 2Tb. There's nothing to argue about here, try it and find out for yourself.[/citation]

More uneducation for everyone... please learn something before posting. The bios does NOT use an MBR to boot, the bios isn't that smart. It merely reads the very first sector of your hard drive, and runs it. It loads to to real mode address 0x7c00 if you really are interested, I do OS development and know a thing or two about how the bios boots your computer. After loading the first 512 bytes (510 are used, 2 are used as a boot signature), it simply runs the program. This small program is responsible for reading the MBR (or GPT if you want more than 2TB). The bios has no clue what an MBR is, nor does it care. Yes, the first sector of the drive typically store the MBR, but the bios does not care about it in any way, shape or form. Go read up on boot loaders, and you'll see that you can boot a drive that has no MBR, be it a hard drive, thumb drive, floppy drive, cd, whatever. How do you think all the new NT kernel versions of windows can use >2TB drives and still use the regular old bios? it is a software issue, not a hardware issue. There is absolutely no reason (besides backwards compatibility, and wanting you to upgrade to newer versions) that xp can't access drivers > 2TB natively. Please please, please, stop passing miss information, do some reading of your own, and report back your findings. You have 1/2 the story, now you just need the other half so you don't sound like an idiot to anyone that knows something.

 

[ready4dis]

[citation][nom]huron[/nom]Wow...that's quite interesting. I thought that Apple was using Intel boards and chips, which should have all the same hardware specs.This is true, but don't the drives with 2k sectors help to alleviate this? This is not specifically BIOS related, but HDD partition/MBR related - the BIOS just checks to see where to boot the drive, which is pointed out the MBR - the BIOS doesn't care about the size of the drive, etc, does it?[/citation]

OMG, haha, more misinformed people trying to sound smart. At least this guy has almost 75% of the story. The MBR does not point out where to boot a drive. The MBR is just that a bootable sector. It's simply one type of bootloader. I have written boot loaders with and without MBR's, for hard drives, floppies, etc. The bios doesn't even know what is contained in an MBR, and has no notion of an MBR. The MBR is software that is supplied with your operating system, not something that is installed with the bios. If Microsoft wrote a new primary boot sector, that used a GPT instead of an MBR, we wouldn't even be having this discussion, it has nothing to do with the bios. Yes, drives with > 512 bytes per sector help get around the 2TB restriction of the MBR (the MBR, not the bios, the bios doesn't have this restriction, please stop saying ti does!). Why they are trying to fix software by making different hardware is beyond me though. If they would just fix the software, then there would be no reason to change hardware. And boot loader's aren't exactly rocket science if you know assembly.

 

[ready4dis]

[citation][nom]kelemvor4[/nom]Intel created EFI as I understand it. I had an Itanium workstation from HP at one point with XP IA64.I don't believe the sector size is stored on the disk, rather it's programmed into the BIOS. I know the MBR must be 512 bytes but I suppose if the MBR code section had instructions to use a larger sector size for the rest of the disk it might be possible. MBR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_recordAs for the driver concerns. Isn't it only low level drivers that would need to be written to firmware such as the ones that display your bios boot screen today? My assumption was that after performing basic boot operations you could load additional high level drivers as you already do in operating systems today.[/citation]

Omg, someone looked up something on MBR's before posting, and still got it mostly wrong, but at least he put in 10% effort on google! The MBR code DOES have something to read > 512byte sectors, the bios interrupt's do this perfectly fine. You can even ask the bios how big the sector size is before reading the sector so you know if you're dealing with 512 bytes, or not. There is a reason, the FAT file format stores the logical bytes per sector as a variable in it's header, because it is allowed to be something other than 512, it's just 512 was generally used, then it was used so often that things assumed it would always be, then everyone just assumed it would always be and forgot that you could use something other than 512. If you really want to learn something, look up interrupt 13h, function 48h, or do a search on LBA (linear block addressing). It is the current method employed by M$'s MBR, and fully supports drives that do not have 512 byte sectors.

EFI isn't hear to 'fix' any hardware limitations. I'm not saying it's useless, but I do feel it is making the BIOS overly complex in ways that it doesn't need to be. Does the BIOS need replacement? Yes, there are way to many bandaides on it currently. Is EFI the solution? Well, sadly it seems that's the direction the industry will eventually head, but I don't think it's the correct solution. Personally I think something in between would be great, but I don't really have a say in it. More proof of EFI being nothing more than a software patch to the bios, is the fact that they wrote an EFI bootloader for USB drives that emulates EFI to trick your OS into thinking it was booted through EFI, when, infact, it is just the lonely ol' bios doing it's thing as always. If anyone wants to actually learn something on how the bios/boot loader/os interact, feel free to contact me, and please keep the BS down and do some research before posting more misinformation about something you heard from some guy that did some thing.

 

[blackmancer]

I can't believe no one has asked the most important question of all

"but will it play Crysis?"

 

[techguy378]

[citation][nom]ready4dis[/nom]More uneducation for everyone... please learn something before posting. The bios does NOT use an MBR to boot, the bios isn't that smart. It merely reads the very first sector of your hard drive, and runs it. It loads to to real mode address 0x7c00 if you really are interested, I do OS development and know a thing or two about how the bios boots your computer. After loading the first 512 bytes (510 are used, 2 are used as a boot signature), it simply runs the program. This small program is responsible for reading the MBR (or GPT if you want more than 2TB). The bios has no clue what an MBR is, nor does it care. Yes, the first sector of the drive typically store the MBR, but the bios does not care about it in any way, shape or form. Go read up on boot loaders, and you'll see that you can boot a drive that has no MBR, be it a hard drive, thumb drive, floppy drive, cd, whatever. How do you think all the new NT kernel versions of windows can use >2TB drives and still use the regular old bios? it is a software issue, not a hardware issue. There is absolutely no reason (besides backwards compatibility, and wanting you to upgrade to newer versions) that xp can't access drivers > 2TB natively. Please please, please, stop passing miss information, do some reading of your own, and report back your findings. You have 1/2 the story, now you just need the other half so you don't sound like an idiot to anyone that knows something.[/citation]
A BIOS can't boot from anything but a disk with an MBR. Microsoft didn't do anything special in Windows to prevent you from booting from a GPT disk using a BIOS. The reason that Windows XP doesn't support hard disks greater than 2TB is because of the BIOS. If Windows XP supported EFI then it would have no problem with hard disks greater than 2TB.

 

[ready4dis]

[citation][nom]techguy378[/nom]A BIOS can't boot from anything but a disk with an MBR. Microsoft didn't do anything special in Windows to prevent you from booting from a GPT disk using a BIOS. The reason that Windows XP doesn't support hard disks greater than 2TB is because of the BIOS. If Windows XP supported EFI then it would have no problem with hard disks greater than 2TB.[/citation]

Wrong, a bios can't boot without a primary boot sector, it doesn't need an MBR. I've written boot loaders without MBR's, it works perfectly fine. No, they didn't do anything to prevent you from booting from a GPT disk, but they didn't do anything to support it either. If you say XP can't support it due to the bios, then how come linux supports it? Even without EFI it is supported in linux. If XP supported EFI they would have no choice but to support GPT, which is the actual reason it would work. There is nothing stopping them from adding in GPT support without EFI, since they are 2 seperate things. Even on microsoft's help site they say that you can use GPT without EFI, it's no friggin surprise, I don't know where everyone is getting this wrong information from (maybe news sites posting it all the time?). For some reason you guys cannot think and gather information on your own if it's not fed directly to you. I am telling you the straight up information, I have done a good amount of operating system development, from writing my own MBR that boots multiple OS's, to boot loaders, to kernel's, drivers, you name, i've probably worked on it. I know more about how BIOS's work and how booting a machine works than most people you will find on this site (especially if these responses are what people on this site think). I can write you a boot loader that doesn't have an MBR and send you an image of a hard drive to run in an x86 emulator like bochs, and prove that you can run stuff without a master boot record.

Also, if you think an MBR is required to boot, try putting a floppy in a drive (if you can find one). Low and behold, floppies don't have MBR, they are treated as a single partition. It is (was?) also common for USB drives to not have an MBR and be treated as a single partition, and it is still possible to boot from those as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/gpt_faq.mspx - Specifically #5.
"5. Is EFI required for a GPT disk?
No. GPT disks are self-identifying. All the information needed to interpret the partitioning scheme of a GPT disk is completely contained in structures in specified locations on the physical media."
Even Microsoft states that you don't need EFI for GPT disks! They just chose not to support it in XP.

 

[techguy378]

[citation][nom]ready4dis[/nom]Wrong, a bios can't boot without a primary boot sector, it doesn't need an MBR. I've written boot loaders without MBR's, it works perfectly fine. No, they didn't do anything to prevent you from booting from a GPT disk, but they didn't do anything to support it either. If you say XP can't support it due to the bios, then how come linux supports it? Even without EFI it is supported in linux. If XP supported EFI they would have no choice but to support GPT, which is the actual reason it would work. There is nothing stopping them from adding in GPT support without EFI, since they are 2 seperate things. Even on microsoft's help site they say that you can use GPT without EFI, it's no friggin surprise, I don't know where everyone is getting this wrong information from (maybe news sites posting it all the time?). For some reason you guys cannot think and gather information on your own if it's not fed directly to you. I am telling you the straight up information, I have done a good amount of operating system development, from writing my own MBR that boots multiple OS's, to boot loaders, to kernel's, drivers, you name, i've probably worked on it. I know more about how BIOS's work and how booting a machine works than most people you will find on this site (especially if these responses are what people on this site think). I can write you a boot loader that doesn't have an MBR and send you an image of a hard drive to run in an x86 emulator like bochs, and prove that you can run stuff without a master boot record.Also, if you think an MBR is required to boot, try putting a floppy in a drive (if you can find one). Low and behold, floppies don't have MBR, they are treated as a single partition. It is (was?) also common for USB drives to not have an MBR and be treated as a single partition, and it is still possible to boot from those as well.http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devi [...] t_faq.mspx - Specifically #5."5. Is EFI required for a GPT disk?No. GPT disks are self-identifying. All the information needed to interpret the partitioning scheme of a GPT disk is completely contained in structures in specified locations on the physical media."Even Microsoft states that you don't need EFI for GPT disks! They just chose not to support it in XP.[/citation]
I have an Intel DP43TF motherboard which supports every single feature that EFI has to offer on the x86 and x64 architecture. The BIOS compatibility module that runs on top of the EFI firmware will not boot from anything but an MBR partition. It doesn't matter if you're running Linux, some hacked copy of Mac OS X or Windows. Intel's motherboards have the most advanced EFI implementation of any x86 architecture motherboard ever created. Intel's EFI compliant motherboards aren't the only ones that have this problem. It IS possible, however, to boot from GPT partitions if an EFI install of an operating system is performed. Even Intel's newest enthusiast Core 5/7 motherboards have this very same limitation.

 

[ready4dis]

You my friend, are an idiot. Use a computer with a bios, and I assure you you can boot from a floppy disk or a usb drive without an MBR. Don't confuse and MBR with a bootable sector, they aren't the same thing, but both perform similar functions. Just because it has a compatibility layer, doesn't mean it's just like the real thing, but I am pretty sure it can still boot from CD, which doesn't have an MBR, or a floppy if you still had something that old laying around. Or, format a usb drive without an MBR, and put one of the development OS's that use custom partition schemes without MBR's that work perfectly on old bios'. Stop pretending like you know anything about how a bios or computer works. Let me explain it, let me know where you get lost.
BIOS Starts up, and initializes all devices. It then checks your boot order you have selected (or default if you haven't gone into your bios). It then loads the FIRST sector of selected device (floppy, hd, cd, usb), whatever, to 0x7C00. It then checks that the last word (that's 2-bytes just incase you know less than i'm giving you credit for) to make sure it's 0xAA55 (also known as the boot signature, this is what tells the bios if this device is bootable or not). After verifying this boot signature (some bios' don't even check it actually, and some have an option to check it or not), it will pass control to the boot loader (aka, first sector of the boot device). The boot loader needs to determine how it wants to treat the boot device. The MOST COMMON method is by using an MBR (master boot record) within the first sector. The boot loader would read the MBR, and by checking the flags of each of the 4 entries, determine which is the bootable partition. Notice, this is the boot loader (boot sector) doing the checking of the MBR, NOT THE BIOS. The bios didn't care what the hell the partitioning method is, all it cares is that it found a boot signature and passed control. Please please please, read up on something before you sound even more retarded than you already do. I would also be willing to bet your motherboard does boot from something other than an MBR, please put a CD in your drive that's bootable and let me know what happens. If you're still not convinced, I could write some code to format a thumb drive with a custom boot loader that has no MBR and displays some random BS to your screen just to prove it's loading, but I doubt you'd follow through with checking since you obviously know more about the boot process than someone that has written multiple boot loaders, partition schemes, file system drives, partitioners, formatters, and a 32-bit multi tasking os of his own.