[SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?

[Peter Stuge]

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