rdos wrote:
Currently, I see UEFI as no more than another fancy boot-protocol.
rdos wrote:
...lies a legacy video BIOS with VBE
rdos wrote:
...execute the BIOS int that sets video-mode to text (preferently in real-mode). It will probably work on most machines (at least today it will).
Perhaps the basic idea of UEFI is good. However, the current implementations seem to make this as an unelegant mess. The old BIOS interrupt calls being still available on most machines today and BIOS working as a backend... I do not what to think about it but it does not make UEFI look like very revolutionary. Of course, tested BIOS code base and knowledge of it affect to this.
When the PCs were best when looking from the OS developing viewpoint? At the beginning, when the "real mode" was only supported? About 1995 when there were no ACPI, APIC, IOAPIC etc. but the VBE was available? Year 2012 when there are UEFI, <abbreviation>, <abbreviation>, <abbreviation>, <abbreviation>, <abbreviation>, and <abbreviation>?
Owen wrote:
No paging, no interrupts, no hardware access except through UEFI drivers. You're pretty buggered.
All being software implemented? Interrupts implementation with some weird "polling-message-passing-cooperative-multitasking system"? I am not serious but that just came to mind.