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

[Chip]

Bob Bell wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 09:08:16PM -0500, Chip
> <chip.programmer at att.net> wrote:
>> They have been trying to push that for three years.  Unless all the
>> hardware can initialize itself magically, including PCI, AGP, Video,
>> USB, keyboards, there will continue to be a need for BIOS.
>
> [ Note: I'm not an expert, what I'm about to say may be grossly
> incorrect, but I think it's true ]
>
>     Not magically, but the hardware does initialize itself.  You
> install
> EFI drivers on the FAT32 EFI partition on your boot device, which the
> firmware can then use to provide at a least a basic interface to your
> hardware.
>
>     Commercial UNIX workstations have been doing this for years.  Of
> course, there you have tighter control over what goes into a box, so
> you
> can keep the firmware somewhat close to the vest, too.  Intel doesn't
> have the same control over IPF and IA-32 boxes, which is why EFI is
> a more open and documented interface.

Much of the hardware powers on in an unknown state, therefore will need to
be initialized.  Some hardware have firmware that will initialize to a
default state at power good, but that default state may not be what is
desired for a particular system configuration.

There needs to be some mechanism to initialize PCI before any boot device
can be found.  PCI does not come up preinitialized to a given set of I/O and
memory ranges, that has to be determined at run time.  Memory needs to be
sized, verified, and possibly remapped around PCI.  USB also needs to be
initialized before a boot device can be located.  If there is video
somewhere on PCI, one video device needs to be initialized so its PCI OpROM
can be loaded into memory.

When EFI resides on a hard drive (anywhere), Intel cannot ever get away from
having a BIOS, because the path to that storage medium must be found and
initialized before data from that storage can be utilized.  If EFI resides
in firmware on the motherboard, then what is the difference between EFI and
BIOS?  Having EFI in firmware to perform the traditional BIOS functions is
nothing more than renaming BIOS to EFI, and paying Intel your royalties.