On Sat, Jun 02, 2012 at 02:24:35AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Michael scherer wrote:
> For the record, UEFI based motherboard would likely have a graphical
> interface, so no blueish DOS-like commandline thing.
> Of course, that also permit endless graphical customisation.
> See for example
>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLwHKHqBitc
>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCfRWrCj3lc
>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gDWyayfBNs
> ( time spent to search that on youtube, around 30 seconds )
>
> And there is also variation of the interface per vendor, just look on the
> various ASUS motherboard interfaces.
WTF, graphical firmware?! What happened to the KISS principle? :-(
I am quite amazed, you seem to discover the recent trend in motherboards.
( cause yes, such cards are already on the market, a coworker do have one and the
pc is just 1 year old ).
And there is graphical interface I suppose to display shiny reports ( temperature,
fan speed ), to display help with a decent formatting language, or to show
things like "location of card on the motherboard". I would even imagine a system
where you could download updates directly from the interface, permiting to have
1 update interface to test, instead of doing it on the various windows version
( so less QA to do for OEMs, ie cheaper ).
This also shows that we really need Free PC firmware, it's
becoming more and
more of its own operating system.
I assume that you never used anything than a PC to say that, because
Open Firmware bundled a forth interpreter, was able to run arbitrary program, etc.
Or if you take a recent Apple laptop, you would see that rEFIt can
give you access to underlying EFI, letting you run arbitrary sotware, go on
network ( there is ping, traceroute ), among others.
And there is already free pc firmware :
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot
On the other hand, this should make the firmware less
"scary" to users and
make it more viable to require them to make tweaks there.
I would place less hope in interfaces designed by low level coders whose
main priority is to ship ASAP to take over the market by speed.
Neither would I think that fiddling with hardware settings with a graphical interface
would be much safer than with text interfaces. I doubt that
"enable DMA overcommit on shadow memory" would be less scary displayed in a
graphical
interface rather than in pure text. I also doubt that documentation would be so
much easier to understand due to UEFI.
--
Michael Scherer