back to article MSI mobo ditches Bios for EFI

Although the MSI P45D3 Platinum looks like a regular Core 2 motherboard, it breaks new ground. Out goes long-standing PC technology the Bios and in comes UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in its place. UEFI is the successor to the Bios and seeks to take us away from the antiquated method of changing core computer …

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  1. David Hicks
    Paris Hilton

    EFI huh?

    Does this mean easier hackintoshes perhaps?

    Not that I'll be doing that, my non-laptop buying days are over.

  2. James Reed

    WinBIOS - been here before?

    Am I the only one to remember the AMI WinBios which was popular in the late 1990s? Although lacking all the EFI cleverness, this did implement a pseudo-windowing interface to the bios, complete with mouse support. It drove the screen in graphics mode and lots of nice icons for all the various options. I always liked it and it was disappointing when it suddenly disappeared from AMI motherboards.

    Or perhaps there was some reason for this that I'm not aware of?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Lets all replace a very simple easy to use system with a bunch of colourful tosh

    YAY !

    hahahahahhaha

    Used this before, It's pointless .

  4. Colman Lalka
    Stop

    <yawn>

    "GUI BIOS" is the best way to describe this. What a yawn. Even without mouse capabilities it only take a few moments to navigate a BIOS, make changes, and continue the boot. Why increase cost of systems with something so superfluous?

  5. Rocco
    Boffin

    It may be prettier...

    ..but what exactly was wrong with the way BIOS worked? It was not aimed at your nan or typical PC World punter, it just did what it had to with minimal bells & whistles and little chance of getting itself all in a twist. And I doubt a mouse could get me round an Award BIOS quicker than I already can with keyboard.

    Add a 'tasteful' GUI, localisations and a few thousand extra lines of code and what have you got? Something that hopefully does *exactly* the same as before, but is more likely to break...or be broken.

    And anyway, in these 2.0 days of nannyish wizards, GPU-accelerated animated cursors and alpha-blending on everything, mucking about in the BIOS is one of the few ways we can still feel like real men, dammit!

  6. Sooty

    i always thought

    that a bios was simplistic on purpose. You have no graphics drivers, so it can't look that fancy. you really don't want to find that after installing your shiny new graphics cards that you can't alter any settings, as your EFI doesn't support it.

    changing it in windows/linux etc can't be the only option, as you might not have installed it yet, or it might not boot.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Question

    "...moves away from the 25-year-old or more Assembly-based design into a new, very user friendly interface where you can even use a mouse"

    Lovely. How does all this work over a serial console then? :-)

    Sounds very much like we are in danger of entering the MS Windows world where you can't do ANYTHING without a high end graphics card in the machine (and some means of displaying it). Which (a) is pretty silly on a server that otherwise doesn't need a GUI at all and (b) is completely bloody useless if you are on a remote connection to said server.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Just goes to show...

    How far Apple have come and how well they've seen/lead the trends..

    They seem to have a knack for getting the best out of technology that is available. I've had fully-capable EFI on my Macbook Pro since late 2006..

    And the beat goes on... :)

  9. Dave_H
    Thumb Down

    WTF?

    If you ain't capable of driving a keyboard interface - what do you think you are doing messing with BIOS settings?

  10. Scott Broukell

    da BIOS is still there, duh ...

    ... tis only tinkerin' wit the ting! The trusty ol' CMOS bios is right there on the MB. This is only window dressing. More to do with LAZINESS! as is the vast majority of modern computing. Best to always understand what's afoot under the bonnet. Yes it takes time, and it's not much fun or glitzy, but you knows wot is a gooin on in there and understand the Mac Hinery.

    Have a good'n everyone (readers and staff alike) and watch the sherry!

  11. Simon Williams
    Stop

    Beware of the Dark Side

    This seems a very positive reading of what EFI sets out to do. Surely of similar importance (but not nearly as positive) is the fact that it effectively shuts out the user. The kind of customisation available in the BIOS, without ever booting an operating system can be sealed off in EFI, so you can *only* boot into the OS your PC supplier wants you too. Yet again, we end up losing control of our own PCs and hand it instead to Wintel and their computer-building partners.

  12. Carl
    Thumb Down

    What's the floating point?

    Is there really a benefit to a mouse driven interface over the old BIOS screens driven by keyboards? Certainly whilst the screens look more user friendly, they're still not really meant for the casual user to tinker with. And the extra time, space and effort required to run what essentially does the same job less efitiently.

    Granted some bios screens could be a little confusing, but surely that's just down to user interface design. The mere presence of a mouse doesn't automatically mean user interfaces will be well designed and easy to understand.

    But then who am I to stand in the way of progress. Change for the sake of change has never backfired on anyone before .... has it?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    I think that

    people are missing the main capabilities of EFI over standard BIOS..

    EFI offers many programmable advantages over a standard BIOS; a GUI is just the most visible difference between the two.

    Do your research people :)

    Paris, because she's an Extra Fine Individual an all!

  14. David Shepherd
    Stop

    BIOS 2.0

    yup, looks prettier, doesn't do anything new and probably is actually not any better easier to use.

    At least for those of us old enough to remember keying in a bootstrap loader via front panel switches BIOS seems perfectly fit for purpose

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Useful for...?

    At first I thought like the previous posters. And then I recalled the problem of trying to change ANY BIOS settings on a machine via remote access - you can't!

    Sure HP, Dell, IBM, et al have their RACs and ILOs for the servers, but for us lowly plebs with simpler systems being able to tweak stuff like for instance the boot order or the CPU and memory settings via a Terminal Services login would be a godsend!

  16. A
    Stop

    Bleurgh

    I think I'd rather stick with the good old BIOS screens. Text input is simple and the whole thing works well.

    This looks complex, garish and completely unnecessary to me. It even includes games, I mean games in the BIOS FFS?!?

  17. Sureo
    Coat

    BIOS?

    With 4 PCs here I only update something in the BIOS once a year. What's the point? Anyway 5 years ahead and all the PCs will have it so WTF.

  18. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Boffin

    RE: It may be prettier...

    Well, if it's anything like the EFI that goes into Itanium, then it also includes a boot loader which allows you to very easily switch between OSs. It also keeps the OS at arms length from the hardware more than the old BIOS did, which means low level virtualisation will be easier. The big difference is the old EFI was very much CLI and very small, whereas this looks like it has masses of graphics content and will subsequently take longer to load.

  19. Avi

    I might've missed something here

    but is the intention really to encourage someone who can't manage to use a keyboard to make changes to their bios?

    Is this a good thing?

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    rubbish!

    The options available in this new EFI are identical to the traditional BIOS options, including cryptically-worded Northbridge options, RAM latency and so on. So this hasn't made it any more accessible to your average user, all it's done is annoy techies and geeks by making the BIOS slower to access. And no doubt now it's in 16 million colours each BIOS update will be a 2Gb download too. Why fiddle with it unless it was for revolutionary reasons?

    And why can't any electronics manufacturers make pretty interfaces? Raytraced glass spheres are so 1990s!

  21. Nic Brough

    Gnn

    Why? Why do we need this? I need a BIOS that does the basics, and has a minimal set of failure points. A gui is an unnecessary failure point, and now you're asking hardware manufacturers to add further failure points in their firmware too.

    If it's fully usable with a keyboard, why do I need a load of garish headache inducing colours splattered all over it? It's a pretty safe bet that if I'm diving through BIOS settings, I've already got a damn headache.

    Ok, some people need to fiddle with their BIOS, fine, and the current interfaces aren't exactly brilliant, but they don't need to be "improved" this way.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    OS on a chip

    IM, games... so it's an operating system, then? I can see the advantage of an OS-on-a-chip in terms of rapid start times, but it's going to be interesting to square with recent OS development (Linux included). No-one's about to try squeezing the fat American of the OS world (you all know what I'm referring to) onto a chip...

    The only people ever likely to monkey with motherboard settings really don't need a fancy GUI, in fact it'll almost certainly slow them down. And as Rocco pointed out, more code means more risk of bugs and security holes, and I'd rather not being having to install BIOS/EFI updates every month or so. Keep it lean, efficient and secure.

    I'm struggling to see the market for these - the only people who will even know what a BIOS is won't have any use for them, so who's going to pay the premium? Or is there a genuine technical benefit the article didn't cover?

  23. John Scott

    Handy

    Well that is handy, I happen to own the Platinum. Not sure why we need a GUI BIOS, it just means people who don't know what they are doing will get lulled in to a false sense of Windows esq security instead of scared away from a serious looking BIOS which should only be used by people who know what they are doing!

  24. Loki

    The thin edge

    Wont be long before they start cramming it full of additional features, hardware acceleration drivers, full driver support, games (oh, thats already in?), file browser, web browser, email client, office suite.... and hey! Bye bye operating systems.... to be replaced by the EFI... erm, not an operating system.

  25. Thomas

    Will this allow the CPU to be simplified?

    You know, since the EFI operates in at least 32 bit protected mode, so presumably if EFI catches on then Intel/AMD can drop whatever tiny fraction of their silicon is spent on x86 real mode emulation for ye olde BIOS?

  26. mittfh
    Boffin

    Never mind the graphics...

    Let's face it, newbies are hardly likely to go dipping into the BIOS. Having a DOS-like interface helps, as it reinforces the message that should should only go playing with it if you know what you are doing (a newbie is unlikely to know the trick of opening up the case and removing the battery or flipping the CMOS reset jumper).

    What would be more welcome is a help system that actually did help - at least as far as explaining what some of the more obscure settings (like PCI-E Spread Spectrum) do without you needing to fire up a web browser and Google 3rd party sites...

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Isn't it all just firmware?

    BIOS, UEFI, whatever. Yawn

    Paris, because, well, she's apparently good at basic in and out.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Oh noes...

    ...there goes my evenings and weekends. The BIOS will be accessible to World+Dog. The day my father gets his grubby little hands on this his machine will die a horrible death. BIOS is hard for a reason - don't tinker unless you understand what you're doing. Kinda like the engine of a car - don't use a tool on it unless you know what you're using it on and why.

  29. Tom Brown
    Thumb Down

    The KISS Principle

    I prefer things to be simple. The only reason to change the computer's basic settings is something has gone wrong (only once in a blue moon have I ever had to reconfigure it otherwise). When that happens, you *really* don't want a fancy GUI interface, or even the mouse getting in the way. You want it simple. Get in, get it done, and get out again. No stopping to look at the pretty pictures.

    In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the current BIOS interface, which requires few resources, and little effort, to use properly. The *last* thing we need is for someone to screw it up the way Microsoft did Windows, when they came up with that *horrible* AERO. Somehow, they managed to out-ugly XP's Fischer Price interface (I guess that's what they mean by "innovation"). Leave the pretty toys to the kiddies, while the rest of us get our work done.

  30. Paul Slater

    Hmm.. nothing much new here?

    From the screenshots, all the keyboard shortcuts still seem there, the lines of text and options are still in a fixed-width font, and there is still hardly any description of what the settings are about - the "help" for the option to "Enable ACPI Auto Configuration" says "Enables or Disables BIOS ACPI Auto Configuration", for example.

    It looks to me as though all they have done is taken the BIOS as it was, and wrapped it in some fancy paper. A bit like putting tinsel round your telly at Christmas....

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @Sooty

    Same here.

    Also, it looks suitably arcane that (a) your run-of-the-mill user won't try to touch it, and (b) you get some "oohs" and "aahs" from people who can't get their head around someone using a PC without a mouse.

    My brother once remarked that a PC without a mouse was the future as everything seemed to happen much faster... And looking at this EFI thing I kinda hope he's right...

  32. Pierre
    Thumb Down

    So it's not a BIOS and it runs apps

    "I see EFI as a go-between. It’s not really meant to totally replace the Bios, just replace the functions that have been crammed into the Bios over time. So the Bios can revert to its original job"

    together with the fact that it allows you to run games and (probably, in a while) quite a few other apps, I see EFI as an OS... if it's not what they mean to do, it's just a GUI wizzard stuck on top of the BIOS, and we need that like a hard kick in the balls.

    Also, from the same quote we can say that your title is obviously wrong. Nothing has been ditched, it's just hidden behind shiny colors.

  33. Brian D. Switzer
    Thumb Down

    who cares

    I don't need or want a fancy, glitzy interface to change system settings maybe once a year. Why bother? Pay the deisgners to create something useful like a better looking Microsoft Windows. Navigating the BIOS with a keyboard works fine and it's quick. That's all I want.

  34. Tom
    Thumb Down

    Updates?

    Will it take longer for them to fix bugs? Will it cost them more? Will we still get updates after the board is replaced with a new model?

    If this is just something shiny with more bugs that take longer to fix I can do without thankyou!

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    re: Microsoft attempted to paper over some

    of the cracks when it tried to hide the fact that DOS underpins Windows XP.

    as per Page 2 of article (just below Select your boot device image).

    Dos has never underpinned XP or any of the NT family of Windows (or do you mean Windows ME?)

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    The big problem with GUIs

    They make things look too simple - that means people will play with things they should leave alone. So now, not only will we have to help those messing up windows - we will have to sort out their EFI tweaking as well

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Why?

    Waste of time. Your average Joe doesn't need to touch the BIOS, and this really is what it was described as, a pretty bios.

    Total garbage.

  38. soaklord
    Paris Hilton

    Games?

    So if you can run games, etc. on it... Does this not suggest a lot more root kit hacks. Basically, if you can load a game on it, can't you load a more nefarious purpose on it and take control of the computer. Especially if you now have network access, etc. prior to OS boot. Sounds like a much more exploitable machine. Or did I miss something? Paris cause she misses a lot.

  39. Gordon Grant
    Stop

    Couldn't agree more

    It looks nice, sure but heck I'd rather bounce around in the bios using a keyboard anyday, one with a PS/2 connection on it as how many actually have the USB legacy keyboard option enabled in the bios so you can actually boot into the bios using a USB keyboard, that's quite funny actually

    "I can't get it to boot into the BIOS to change anything, I'm pressing the right key but it doesn't do anything....."

    If I need into the BIOS it's generally to check something real fast like WTF just happened, what's the CPU / NB / Sys Temp..

    Sure it's old, but it WORKS, why change something if it works Change for Change sake never works in the end, all I will say to this is "PISTA" i can't bring my self to write out the proper name of that accursed OS.

    I don't need "shiny", I want functional, anyone that can't easily navigate around in there, probably shouldn't be in there in the 1st place, I always read the mobo manual so I know where most things are that I'd need to change / check..

    Bios updates from inside Windows - good idea, a GUI Biox not so good

  40. Dale Richards
    Stop

    Motivation

    "Intel developed the original EFI in a bid to drag the PC out of the 1980s"

    I was always under the impression that Intel developed EFI because the Itanic processors couldn't do the x86 real mode that BIOS requires. I really can't see them messing around with it just because BIOS is old. Yes, it is old, but it works, so why change it? Unless you've just developed a retarded processor that can't handle it, of course...

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DOS DOESN'T underpin XP

    Jeez, how long do we have to up up with journalists making such bogus statements.

  42. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    What can possible go wrong..

    ...with remote administration of the UEFI

  43. Dilbert-wannabe
    Stop

    Where do I start

    The GUI interface for the BIOS setup screen has been done before. OEMs dropped it as it increased implementation cost for no actual benefit. A GUI version of setup is not UEFI, it is merely easier to implement as a side effect of implementing UEFI. The BIOS/UEFI is far more than just the setup screens, GUI or text based.

    UEFI is an attempt to replace the BIOS (not the setup screens which are merely a means of changing settings) which is written mostly in assembler with code written in 'C', thus simplifying implementation and allowing untrained code monkeys to be able to work on the firmware. It is completely failing to do this as UEFI is being implemented as a layer above the traditional BIOS, so the BIOS is still there and has to be developed as usual. UEFI then becomes an extra step in a motherboard development and increases firmware size and cost of deployment which is the main reason for its slow uptake.

    The advantages in UEFI lie in the ability to write more complex code in a richer environment and provide an easier interface to the OS. This is not something that most users will ever have to get involved with, even geeks unless they are writing a new bootloader or their own OS.

    Loading games from a CD is just pointless showing off the possibilities that UEFI provides. After they have gone to the trouble of providing all the extra functionality (don't forget I am not talking about the GUI setup screens here but programming interfaces etc) they feel they need to have something to use it even if it is mere fluff. Until more OSes start to require UEFI in order to provide extra features during boot then UEFI will always be dismissed as irrelevant set dressing.

    This whole story is not even news. There have been plenty of boards supporting UEFI before, mainly Intel motherboards. They haven't changed the world and I doubt MSI is about to either.

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Dale Richards

    Well Intel also developed USB largely to try and kill of serial and parallel ports (and how many new mobos *still* have a frikkin' parallel port on them? Why??!!), so perhaps sometimes they ARE altruistically minded...

    That or (like any business looking to make money) they see a BIG fat chunk of potential licensing revenue from any innovation they can get to take off ;-)

  45. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Flame

    DOS underpins XP? But also...

    - The problem with the BIOS User Interface is not that it is Text-based (more complicated may be useful if you have to manage a RAID from the BIOS, end even then the icon stuff gets tired really fast, especially if the configurator actually does not work).

    The problem is that manufacturers are just plain lazy. I want:

    -- No more DOS. Anywhere. Ever. Even on a firmware floppy. Anyone coming at you with a DOS floppy just be reused for anti-cancer drug testing.

    -- Firmware updates. Should be easy to do and not come in floppy-sized .exe files that you cannot actually use on a CD-ROM because A: must be writeable (hey, Fujitsu-Siemens, you listening? Cretins.)

    -- Control and Interrogation of hardware from the OS through standard APIs. Which also work for a change and are documented How hard is this? Less than putting the flash jitz on the motherboards' website I reckon.

  46. Daniel Palmer
    Flame

    Mac users should feel smug...

    because their EFI implementation is fairly busted .... and only just about works? i.e. 64bit machines not being able to run 64bit EFI executables etc and so forth.

    Anyhow, you shouldn't want EFI because you can add pretty menu's but because you no longer have to work around 1980's BIOS features, i.e you don't have to have 6 million incremental boot straps to get to a point at which you can load and jump into a kernel. It seems tech people are getting more and more "oh shinny things!" than actually being tech-savvy. *sigh*

  47. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Better solution already available for some motherboards

    Anything hidden in the BIOS cannot be changed remotely, and means I have to suffer from crappy vendor support that disappears completely when they decide I have to upgrade. This EFI enables vendors to extend the same problems to add-in cards while limiting my choice of add-in cards.

    I only buy motherboards that are compatible with coreboot: http://www.coreboot.org/

    This solves vendor problems too because they do not have to code new drivers for third party kit if the card already has an open source driver.

  48. James O'Brien
    Coat

    @Paul Slater and I cant believe no one asked this yet

    "It looks to me as though all they have done is taken the BIOS as it was, and wrapped it in some fancy paper. A bit like putting tinsel round your telly at Christmas...."

    Dont make fun of my telly :-P

    But if it runs games how can we forget to ask. . .

    Can it run Crysis?

    /Yes yes bad joke I'll be going now

  49. Dave

    Ugh!

    I've never had a problem with a text-based BIOS, and I often configure a new motherboard before I've found a spare mouse to use with it.

    What would be more use is if they took the ROM space needed for all the GUI crap and put in a more detailed explanation of what each BIOS setting actually meant. I'm still not sure about some of them.

  50. Captain Thyratron
    Thumb Down

    Doing it wrong.

    I liked things like Alpha SRM and Openboot PROM. They gave you a simple command-line environment with the basic anemities of a shell and allowed you to perform low-level debugging or, in the case of OBP, play with the built-in Forth interpreter. They allowed serial consoles to be attached, and included basic networking support in order to facilitate network booting. Any additional functionality resulted entirely from there being a tiny, compact, and fast Forth interpreter that allowed the thing to be modified and extended however was needed.

    BIOS is, to be fair, a nasty old system that needs to go. It makes the firmware on a VAX look futuristic. But EFI is the wrong way. EFI forgets that firmware should rely exclusively on the lowest-level services available--even necessarily relying on graphics and not allowing headless serial communication as an option is a mistake. Firmware is not meant to run general-purpose applications. It should be small, fast, and flexible, and serve to boot the computer, troubleshoot the hardware, and provide a last resort for fixing the machine if it gets so hosed up that it can't boot or even display graphics.

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