Writing an end to the bio of BIOS

I don't understand open firmware because have little experience with it (which is what I'm relating this article too), but it does leave some ability to customize. But not the customization you and I might enjoy with BIOS options on current PCs.

I think this may spell the end of advanced options, such as dram timing controls and chipset specific features. Sounds like they might be planning something that works for all PC platforms.. And when you generalize like that, you lose the specifics.

Well, we'll have to wait, perhaps new ways of configuring things will come, just use your imagination!

I'm very interested in how exactly my system would boot faster?

Most of the boot time of modern computers is taken up by the OS.
A huge (it will be huge compared to BIOS) piece of software will have a lot of overhead. And there are still the CPU to detect, storage devices to enumerate, memory to test before you can even think about booting anything. At most it will be a couple of seconds spared by skipping things like the video/IO peripheral initialisation and PnP enumeration.

And since it will be a largeish opaque piece of software configurable at runtime it will be a dream come true to all hackers, data miners, virus writers and evil corporate masterminds.

But of course it is the paranoid ultra-conservative me talking here.

Well... how much does the bios boot screen take to load... 4 seconds? 10 at most?

I guess it'll take even less with EFI... but... who knows

With Microsoft working on it.. The EFI run time will be no less than 30 seconds and every 10th boot will hang with a blue screen with no reason whatsoever..

nah, no blue screen, instant reset

The "infinite loop" just got a new meaning...

Just think about how many virii writers who'll target any EFI software written by MS... And with their track-record for security holes, chances are we'll see plenty of boxes stuck in a reboot loop...

Perhaps we should wait to see what even comes about from EFI before blaming Microsoft for having security problems with it.

I'd like to see a basic OS built into the hardware, so that you can do some basic maintenance if your OS won't load. That could be installed on eeprom and should be upgradable. The functionality of DOS would suffice, but with upgradable support for various filesystems perhaps.

That built in OS is a nice idea, you could then use a jumper to restore default settings when nothing else works