And in terms of standards compliance? I know proprietary BIOS have advantage when it comes to SMBIOS due to the implementation in SeaBIOS lagging behind several versions.
On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Peter Stuge <[email protected]> wrote: > Fred . wrote: >> How is SeaBIOS working towards the non-technical goals of the project? > > This is not so clear. I'm not even sure that there are non-technical > goals for the project. > > Competing with commercial BIOS products would require a company to > put a SeaBIOS-based PC firmware to market, quite likely in concert > with coreboot. I know of one company which offers among other things > coreboot services, Sage Engineering, who are quite active in the > coreboot community. http://www.se-eng.com/coreboot.html > > But even so you can see that the business model is different from > commercial BIOS products, and already this small difference presents > a non-technical challenge. SeaBIOS lacks documentation. It lacks communication. The website is not updated with news about the development. There is no mention of what's new, whats planned, etc. > > >> That said, still curious about a technical comparison. > > As far as BIOS goes, SeaBIOS will boot and run I believe any OS that > a commercial BIOS product does. Differences at this point are perhaps > primarily how the build is configured and run, how execution is > configured, and the presentation of SeaBIOS during runtime. > > Because SeaBIOS has a technical goal of not spending more time than > neccessary on any task, there isn't much presentation to talk about. > > Build configuration in SeaBIOS is based on Kconfig, comfortable for > anyone who has built a Linux kernel or busybox, but perhaps not > completely intuitive for developers who primarily have experience > from using Windows systems. > > The build system itself of SeaBIOS relies on the GNU toolchain, > including optionally rather new features, contrary to commercial > BIOS products which typically rely on quite old Microsoft toolchains. > > Runtime configuration in SeaBIOS consists of the F12 menu when > multiple boot sources are found, and the QEMU-specific fwcfg > interface - compared to the classic text-mode setup menu screens in > commercial BIOS products. > > Then there's of course the fact that BIOS is no longer really > relevant for many mainboard vendors, whose customers expect UEFI. > > > //Peter > > _______________________________________________ > SeaBIOS mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios _______________________________________________ SeaBIOS mailing list [email protected] http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
