On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 07:08, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
One thing that I am hoping an open source BIOS might get us to is less buggy hardware. The bugginess of this PC hardware is really amazing. The bugginess has persisted because the vendors know they can hide all the ugly problems in the BIOS. These problems lead to memory running slow, weird PCI bus problems, and other failures.
Open source BIOSes reveal the ugly bugs. Possibly this will make the hardware vendors more responsible. We can certainly hope so.
I doubt. From what I have seen, vendors just go the other way. It is really bad for PR (from marketing dept. point of view) if Open Source projects finding out that your HW is buggy. This is why now most PC chipset vendor don't release register specs now.
Ollie