x86 and the classic BIOS - alive and well in 2018

[mikegonta]

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/a ... -ces-2018/

[ggodw000]

Everyone is moving to uefi now, it is a matter of time. Most systems are hybrid between classic and UEFI.
UEFI has lot of adv.-s including 32-bit memory for loading drivers and option ROMs into memory.
Written mostly in C, offers faster development.

[StudlyCaps]

I imagine BIOS will stick around for a while as it becomes cheap enough to stuff into embedded platforms and SoCs but for general purpose computing I'd be surprised if a single BIOS only board has been manufactured in years.

[Octacone]

Glad to see the good old BIOS alive and well.
It is easy and cheap to implement, well known to developers... seems like a reasonable choice.
Currently I'm in the market for an embedded x86 system and this seems like a possible candidate (including UDOO x86 and UDOO bolt).

[Schol-R-LEA]

Note that both of these use an SoC which is made under license, one based on a CPU die layout from over 25 years ago. While these maker-grade SBCs may use it, it is mostly made as a plug-in replacement for embedded controller hardware where the system has to run exactly as it did in the 1980s. In other words, it is a specialized piece of hardware which is unlikely to see wide distribution as a consumer-grade SBC, or even a maker-grade one like these. It's cool that it exists, but it's probably not going to be much of a much except maybe for retro gaming (and even there, an RPi 3B+ or a Rockpro 64 would probably do better than the actual x86 system would).

Note that AFAICT, all the mainstream maker-grade x86 SBCs (such as the aforementioned Udoo x86 and Udoo Bolt) use UEFI firmware.

I imagine BIOS will stick around for a while as it becomes cheap enough to stuff into embedded platforms and SoCs but for general purpose computing I'd be surprised if a single BIOS only board has been manufactured in years.

It won't even be possible on Intel's own chips made after 2020, at least not while using Intel's chipsets (and their aren't any real options for that anymore), as the chipsets will be removing the CSM entirely after that. That's Word of God, from Intel's own roadmap.

And, as I said in another thread earlier today, there is reason to believe that they will be removing real mode entirely from the new CPUs at that point, and may begin phasing out protected mode in favor of long mode.

AMD may do it differently, but from all indicators, they are even more eager to get rid of the legacy subsystems outright. This is hardly surprising, as Long Mode was their creation in the first place. I don't know offhand if their public roadmap says anything about it, though.

[eekee]

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/are-designers-still-using-the-vortex86-old-cpu-ces-2018/

This sort of thing reminds me I don't need to worry about lack of hardware in the future unless I want to support web behemoths on my own OS, which I very much don't.

Everyone is moving to uefi now, it is a matter of time.

I've heard lines like this a thousand times. Anyone who uses the word "everyone" like this in a tech context is only looking at the hyped sparkly stuff, the pop stars of tech, while not looking to see what really can be done. PS/2 was obsolete over a decade ago, but you can still get motherboards with PS/2 ports, and not just for embedded work. DOS is not dead either, certainly not for commercial applications, as shown by the very first entry in the list of operating systems explicitly supported by that new SoC linked above. I'm thinking there's at least a decade of life left in the BIOS.

I'm a little bit worried by Schol-R-LEA's musing that it may not get into maker-grade boards, but not too worried.