Intel says the PC BIOS will be replaced with 'EFI'

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 11:13:09 EST
bscott at ntisys.com said:

>http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2130826,00.html
>
>  Comments?

About Fsck'ing time :)

Seriously, if what Travis says:

  Travis> They're just switching to openfirmware.

is true, then I'll be quite happy.  One of the nice things about 
working with Sun hardware was that if there was a problem with the 
OS, it was always trivial to go into the EEPROM and change the 
configuration to boot off of a different device without having to 
later reboot and change back later.  Another really nice thing about 
Sun's use of openfirmware, was that it was programmable from the OS 
level, so once the machine had actually booted, you could change the 
boot device for the next time. 

These types of things, along with native net-boot capability made 
things like Solaris' JumpStart really nice to work with.

PC's just aren't there now.  PXE is a start, but that's not standard 
across machines, and is NIC dependant.  Additionally, you still need 
to muck with the BIOS to make sure it supports net-boots, and you 
need to then separately configure the NIC(s) to boot.  It's mess and 
it's long past time they fix it :)

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
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	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

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