Analysis of the current state and proposed future path for SeaBIOS.

[Fred .]

Analysis of the current state and proposed future path for SeaBIOS.

== Website ==
The current SeaBIOS website lacks information and is very basic.
SeaBIOS needs a more informative website with documentation and information.

== Logo ==
SeaBIOS have no logo.
Award/Phoenix, AMI, Insyde, etc have a logo.
Perhaps SeaBIOS should have a logo too?

== Features & Standards ==
In many aspects SeaBIOS is behind the competition.

* Award/Phoenix, AMI, Inside have setup screen. SeaBIOS does not.
SeaBIOS _needs_ a setup menu in order to win the minds of enthusiasts,
geeks and non-embedded systems.

* Competition have password protection. SeaBIOS does not.

* SeaBIOS is behind in standards. SeaBIOS supports SMBIOS 2.4, while
the competition is ahead, and the recent standard is SMBIOS 2.7.1.

* SeaBIOS does not support ESCD. The competition supports this.

* SeaBIOS does not support (GUID Partition Table) GPT. It seems the
competition does not either. However it is possible to implement GPT
support in BIOS. Doing so would give SeaBIOS a competitive advantage
over the competition.

* SeaBIOS supports USB UHCI and OHCI. It should support the latest xHCI.

* SeaBIOS supports 32-bit PCI. It should support 64-bit PCI.

* Competition supports small logos in the corners. SeaBIOS only
supports fullscreen logos.

What features are under development?
What features & standards are not supported yet?
What features would we like to have?
What features are planned?
We need to document this.

== Unimportant features ==
* SeaBIOS does not support the PNG format which is superior to
currently BMP and JPG.
* SeaBIOS uses LZMA compression. The successor LZMA2 is out.
* Linux and Windows have animated splash screens on bootup. It would
be cool if SeaBIOS could have animated flash, via APNG or MNG.

== Usage & Community ==
SeaBIOS is used by coreboot, KVM, QEMU and Bochs.
SeaBIOS should be used more widely on platforms and platform virtual machines.
SeaBIOS should be supported by VirtualBox and VMware, can this be
accomplished? how?
What other platform virtual machines can SeaBIOS be supported/integrated with?
The different communities needs to work tighter together to commonly
develop SeaBIOS into a tier one BIOS.