
“EFI?  Intel has been trying to shove that down our throats for years.” (2003) - yuhong
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.asm.x86/zII4DSiAFUs/VRG4M8F12UwJ
======
mwfunk
What is this particular HN post supposed to be pointing out? This is a very
old thread in a newsgroup about the usage of protected mode in the
(traditionally 16-bit) de facto standard PC BIOS, but the link wasn't to the
thread. Rather the link was to this one specific post.

Is the editorializing about EFI the thing that is supposed to be interesting
here? If so, here it is in its entirety:

"EFI?? Intel has been trying to shove that down our throats for years. IMO it
hasn't been adopted by the industry because it would require a large
investment in infrastructure to get the ball rolling. You have to understand
that a lot of BIOS development has gone to the Pacific Rim area where labor is
cheap but excellent. Margins are so thin on motherboards the OEMs don't want
to retrain their BIOS programmers to start with EFI when everything is working
just fine with a traditional BIOS because each new project is leveraged from
the prior. I guess after a while we'll all be assimilated into EFI by Intel,
but yikes, that means I'd have to learn 'C'."

OK, and...? This is a mostly reasonable observation for a reasonably informed
PC BIOS engineer to make in 2003, but I don't know what insight people on HN
are supposed to get from it in 2016.

~~~
yuhong
Even now UEFI bugs are still a serious problem. And it was not long after this
was posted that IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo for example.

~~~
wtallis
So? PC firmware bugs have been a serious problem at least as far back as the
introduction of ACPI. (U)EFI vs BIOS doesn't seem to have made much
difference.

~~~
Sanddancer
Earlier than that, even. 100% PC compatibility used to be measured on if the
PC itself could run Flight Simulator, because Flight Simulator made a lot of
bios calls, etc, and a lot of early bioses were rather buggy. Those were also
the fun days where updating your bios meant removing the chip and replacing it
with a new one

------
yuhong
I should also mention ACPI. ACPI 1.0 for example dates back to the end of 1996
(of course before then there was drafts):

[http://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_1.pdf](http://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_1.pdf)

But of course ACPI took years to catch on, during which low cost PCs from for
example eMachines was coming. EFI was actually designed not long after ACPI,
but it was first targeted at IA64.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
I miss the old PowerPC/POWER OpenFirmware days and hacking about in it with
Forth.

~~~
PeCaN
OpenFirmware is still around and open source:
[http://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware](http://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware)

By _far_ the most sane boot system IMO. Shame it never really caught on. I
guess IBM was stuck in their own little (albeit fascinating) world, per the
usual….

~~~
protomyth
Wasn't OpenFirmware a Sun thing? I thought that was how it migrated because a
lot of Sun stuff made it elsewhere (well, before Oracle).

~~~
PeCaN
Actually, maybe it was. I tend to associate it with IBM since it's mainly used
for POWER and PowerPC, but now that you mention it I think Sun created it.
Does anyone know if Oracle's SPARC still uses OpenFirmware?

------
yuhong
I have two Twitter threads on this:

[https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/751955059609526272](https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/751955059609526272)

[https://twitter.com/getwired/status/752737513005912064](https://twitter.com/getwired/status/752737513005912064)

I should also mention a more recent Slashdot post:

[https://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8693705&cid=51419...](https://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8693705&cid=51419159)

