"ron minnich" rminnich@gmail.com writes:
There is lots of virtual hardware in our PCs nowadays, and the OSes depend on it. My early hope was that we would free Linux from this model. But Linux now depends on the "Steenkin' BIOS" more than it ever did -- you can't boot a K8 in Linux without ACPI there. Linux dependency on the BIOS is increasing over time.
Let's just remember that the practical boundary we draw is support for mainboard specific things. We need to do one of a couple of things. - Pass a device tree (or other data structure) to the kernel with all of the little motherboard specific wiring details to get software that understands the hardware to work. - Make using and understanding the hardware irrelevant. - Some level of virtualization.
In general the firmware is the hardest and most dangerous part of the system to update. Plus there is never enough time to develop it. So we need to keep things as simple as we can (for developers at least).
Eric