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.
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
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 peter@stuge.se 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 SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
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Fred . -
Peter Stuge