Why bios(generic) is slow?

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2002 hcyun at etri.re.kr wrote:

> Can you tell me why generic bios is so slow compared to linuxbios. 
> In other word, why linuxbios is fast? 

it would require us to profile the bios which we can't do (we don't have 
source).

I am told by those who have sources that commercial bios'es are an large 
mess of assembly code with lots of repeated code and fixes for hardware 
that has not existed for 10 years. I find these stories believable ...

ron