On Fri, 6 May 2005, James wrote:
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.
Yep, intel is very uncooperative, which is why linuxbios recommends amd motherboards...
Bios is involved in more than the boot processes in today's machines. Linux or not.
Which is why I mentioned linuxbios. The (cold) bootstrap needs to initialise memory, and certain other hardware, which is what linuxbios does. It then leaves the rest up to the "payload" (which can be the linux kernel, filo, etherboot etc.).
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 link that I gave specifically warns about this; all I wanted to say is that it can be done...
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!
Yes, that situation is quite sad, which is why projects like linuxbios is all the more important, even though the initial goal of linuxbios was a little bit different...
Best regards
Peter K -- [email protected] mailing list
