Patrick Georgi wrote:
bari schrieb:
I'm not sure if their investors and management feel that a closed source BIOS has the only hope of success in the market or if they are unaware of LinuxBIOS.
In case of Phoenix it's probably because they have most of the necessary code lying around already, and seem to do quite well with their closed source business model.
Phoenix is now publicizing a "we have it to" since DeviceVM made their announcement. Is it just catch up in case they are missing anything? Is there a real demand for near instant boot to email, browser and multimedia players? If so LinuxBIOS easily supports this.
Up to a few years ago a PC BIOS still needed to support OS's that rely on BIOS calls. That need has and is still dwindling. Is this still a major reason for the popularity of the closed source BIOS?
Intel has been pushing their own agenda with EFI (and TCPA) and ignores LinuxBIOS. Is this another reason why closed source BIOS is still going strong?
Back in 2003 Slashdot had an interview with an AMI developer: http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/17/1430214 where he brought up the issues of NDA's on chipsets. I'm sure everyone can understand why a chipset vendor would want to keep information secret about a chipset before it is released into the market. But after it is released (even after several months), why all the secrecy?
All the LinuxBIOS community basically needs in order to port a BIOS are register settings and the order in which they should be set. Are the concerns of violating patents on chipset IP or fixing engineering mistakes in silicon with BIOS that great a problem?
Motherboard schematics are another issue. Interrupt routing and use of GPIO's are not big secrets. Obfuscated FLASH write enables have always been hacked by end users when really needed. What are the "secrets" in typical motherboard schematics?
Are ideologies or the need to have control of information the reasons closed source BIOS is still so popular?
Do vendors really feel that they will have tech support nightmares if they release accurate and unsupported BIOS specifications?
-Bari