[SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?

[Fred .]

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 at 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
>
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