Peter Karlsson <petekarl <at> student.chalmers.se> writes: > > For most of the legacy hardware: drives, floppy, CD, mouse, serial ports > > this may be true. But, let's think about ACPI, I2C, sensors, SMBus, > > Dallas one-wire, and the myriad of undocumented hardware/comm channels > > going on the motherboard. Not to mention that the evil one from redmond > > has convinced quite a few hardware vendors to pursue nefarious > > activities during the boot process..... > > Afaik, the linux kernel does not use bios at all. Thats why linuxbios is > using the linux kernel since it has built-in drivers to access whatever > hardware it needs to access (+ the cold boot step of linuxbios to setup > the hardware of course).
You might want to take a look at what Richard Stallman has to say: http://www.fsf.org/news/freebios.html <ship> The most uncooperative company is Intel, which has started a sham "open source" BIOS project. The software consists of all the unimportant parts of of a BIOS, without the hard parts. It won't run, and doesn't bring us any closer to a BIOS that does run. It is just a distraction. <snip> Bios is involved in more than the boot processes in today's machines. Linux or not. > > Have you actually removed a bios/flash chip or erased it after boot > > to test your theory? I think what you have said is true of older boards > > and some current vendors, but, certainly not is all cases.... > > http://wiki.linuxbios.org/data/howto/SiS630, > scroll down to step 6... Removing chip (flash/eeprom/whater) when a motherboard has power on it is a really,really bad idea. It's quite easy for static or dc voltages to jump pins and kill the chip, if not smoke the board/buss. Beside, The fact that you have to remove the chip while the system that is booted/powered up substantiates my claim of "nefariuos activities" as this is just plain ridiculous. The part I like is when Richard talks about Intel and certain software companies that want you to replace the motherboards native firmware with an executable. This speaks volumes about the situation. Even wonderful IBM is in on the action. AS a firmware engineer, you'd be surprised at the vendor request for code that does strange things on USB, I2C and FAT16 ... just in little embedded products. Evil lurks in things undocumented, and it's just not only the American companies at work on this. That's why the FBI and CIA will use COTS products for anything anymore. Most other nations do the same shit........Only the little and honest people get screwed! Who knows what's inside your BIOS.... and now it can be remotely changed! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (BIOS).... Caveat Emptor James -- [email protected] mailing list
