[SeaBIOS] (no subject)

[David Hendricks]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:47 AM, Fred . <eldmannen at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The ability for SeaBIOS to launch a "setup program" is already present
> > - it just requires the creation of this setup program.  Several
> > coreboot payloads already have some menu drawing code, so this
> > shouldn't be too difficult.  Frankly though, there isn't much to
> > configure (and that is a good thing).
> >
> >> * Competition have password protection. SeaBIOS does not.
> >
> > Again - this is part of the "setup program" - there is nothing in
> > SeaBIOS to protect.
> The BIOS of the competition have two types of passwords.
> One to boot the system and one to access the setup screen.
> Password for bootup has nothing todo with the "setup program".
> Since there is currently no such setup program, the initial
> implementation for a bootup password could use a password configured
> at compile-time.
>

I think it's useful to step back and look at it in a different light. The
"competition" follows a very different usage model than coreboot and
SeaBIOS; Many commercial BIOS products are essentially OSes in themselves,
which has historically been considered a bad thing in the coreboot
community and by extension the SeaBIOS community.

>From that perspective, it doesn't make much sense for SeaBIOS to have a
boot password when every modern OS has a robust authentication mechanism
already.

(you have some good ideas, but keep in mind many people simply want SeaBIOS
to do its job and get out of the way)

>
> >> * SeaBIOS supports 32-bit PCI. It should support 64-bit PCI.
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean here.
> I've read that SeaBIOS supports 32-bit PCI.
> http://www.seabios.org/Releases#SeaBIOS_0.5.1
> PCI also have 64-bit.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI#64-bit_PCI


64-bit PCI is actually obsolete. It was used for a period in server
platforms, but has been supplanted by PCI Express.

David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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