Phoenix BIOSOS? 394
jhfry writes "In an interesting development by an unexpected source, Phoenix Technologies is releasing a Linux-based, virtualization-enabled, BIOS-based OS for computers. They implemented a full Linux distro right on the BIOS chips, and by using integrated virtualization technology, it 'allows PCs and laptops to hot-switch between the main operating system, such as Windows, and the HyperSpace environment.' So, essentially, they are 'trying to create a new market using the ideas of a fast-booting, safe platform that people can work in, but remain outside of Windows.'"
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Interesting)
The Paranoid Conspiracist in me says: "This is an essential step for the trusted computing platform, where a government or corporate owned rootkit could exist on your computer, with little to no ability to be replaced or removed by the owner of the machine."
SplashTop (Score:4, Interesting)
So is this fundamentally different from Asus putting SplashTop on some of their netbooks and motherboards?
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Interesting)
In the fourth case, the core security software grabs input and output from the network and disk to check the data for security threats. In that case, "you won't even really know you are using hyperspace," Hobbs says.
Talk about the setup for the rootkit from hell.
Re:SplashTop (Score:5, Interesting)
> So is this fundamentally different from Asus putting SplashTop on some of their netbooks and motherboards?
Very different. What Phoenix is doing is pushing Windows into a VM, permanently. The machine boots Linux from the BIOS and loads Windows into a VM container in the background while you have a basic Linux desktop to browse the web, read email, etc. You can flip between Windows and Linux with a hotkey. But Windows stays in the VM. This offers a hope of eventually containing the menace from Redmond. The question is whether Phoenix will want to go there.
Imagine a real firewall dropped between the virtual NIC in Windows and the real one. Even better, just forget the network in Windows for most uses, use the Firefox on the 'other' more safe system that is a hotkey away. Push this tech a bit more and have seamless Windows(tm) windows running rootless on the X side. Now we don't even need to worry about two different displays. Basically, this tech offers the potential to blur the line between Windows and a real Internet ready system in ways impossible to predict. This could erase enough of Windows' defects to keep it viable or it could remove enough of the reasons to run Windows it hurts it. But Pandora's box is open and it will be interesting.
Re:If it works . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Hyperspace is an extremely fast booting (approx 4 seconds) Linux based mini OS. It is available in two flavors. On PCs without the Intel's VT extensions it is just a fast booting OS, but you can only dual boot it.
On PC's with VT, the bios loads a hypervisor which then boots both Hyperspace, and windows. (It may defer starting windows until hyperspace has loaded). The result is that within for seconds you can begin using the computer, doing things like browsing the web while windows. Once Windows is up, users can instantly switch back and forth.
In theory there should be little reason why other OS could not be used instead of windows, although the system may be installing special drivers in windows to help mitigate some issues.
Re:If it works . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called DOS, and it was done a long time ago.. (Score:5, Interesting)
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
That said, I would rather have a read-only, default, fallback, usable OS in the system firmware. You know, something that could be used for:
The PC is one of the few platforms where the hardware is actually useless to the end user without an installed operating system. Reflashable BIOSes further compound the problem by allowing a software command to render the hardware unbootable and unrecoverable (that is, unless you happen to have a FLASH programmer and another computer lying around...). The PC has perhaps the worst architure and implementation of any major platform, and it's about time they did something to fix that.
In fact, with the falling prices of flash, why not just flash a Linux kernel into the BIOS?
Prediction (Score:1, Interesting)
I predict that this marks a turning point for the last decade's massive success of the Intel architecture. The concept of a "closed and secret" BIOS has been a mess for a long time. It has worked because of a symbiotic relationship between Microsoft, BIOS vendors and Intel (AMD just hooked on). When BIOS vendors start things like this, Microsoft will no longer work with the BIOS vendors (which is dominated by Phoenix/AMI, Insyde and some smaller guys) We'll see what happens with EFI, but my prediction is that this will open up for ARM and possibly some competition from other architectures on heavier hardware. Interesting... It's definitely a win for Linux in more than just the obvious "Linux in the BIOS" way (which isn't really something I would want anyway).
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If it works . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Just work on coreboot damnit! (Score:4, Interesting)
It's high time the old unflexible piece of crap BIOS died.
Did they publish the source? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this include Linux code in the BIOS itself, or only load it off disk and use it. If the former, did they publish the source?
That's pretty awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
People will be able to distinguish between "my computer has crashed" and "Windows has crashed" because, when Windows dies, they will be able to hot-key to the still-running BIOS OS.
That's a very nice innovation. I look forward to buying a mobo which can do this.
Old news: announced more than a year ago (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have yet to discover a device in my house that just works when I plug it into my Microsoft Windows Vista computer (exceptions being USB mass storage devices).
This is in stark contrast to the fact that all devices in my house (scanners, printers, phones, cameras, etc) work straight away when plugged into my Linux machines (Ubuntu 9.04 and Suse 11.1).
It isn't coincidence, Linux has had better 'out-of-the-box' support for devices than Windows for quite a while now.
Re:SplashTop (Score:2, Interesting)
Under this scheme, people would just end up complaining that their firefox works, but none of their other apps will start. Under the hood, the Linux system will be fine (since Windows can't touch it) but Windows will be crashing in the background when it doesn't like the environment it's told to boot in.
By ensuring that the first thing the user sees is a running Linux desktop, before Windows starts to boot, people won't blame Linux, because as far as they're concerned, it's just built in to their machine, and it's Windows that broke.
The more things change... (Score:1, Interesting)
...the more they stay the same. My first computer had Z80 Basic (which, as in many 8-bitters, was the OS) in ROM, along with a debugger and a word processor. This was in 1983. My second computer (circa 1986) had this plus a semi-graphical UI for navigating between things and booting those new-fangled floppy disk things.
And let's not forget what the BIOS was actually *intended* for: namely to provide an standard abstraction layer between the hardware and the software. If anything this Pheonix just seem to be getting back to implementing what should have been long ago.
Re:Hrm (Score:4, Interesting)
As a system administrator, I disagree in the strongest possible terms. I'd love to be able to have the domain clients here restricted to an authorized software list. I could let users install things they needed or wanted instead of having to do everything for them, but I could restrict the list of available code to things I'd verified were safe and wouldn't cause system issues, security problems, etc. It'd also offer significant protection against resident malware. It'd be great.
Even being able to detect when a machine had unauthorized software on it would be a huge plus.
The parent poster's point is an excellent one - often the user of the computer isn't the owner, and/or isn't the person responsible for managing and maintaining it. In these cases remote attestation becomes highly attractive.
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not necessarily. That depends on whether or not it's a good use of his time.
Developer time is probably better spent supporting current devices with decent specifications, which are more likely to be useful for a long time.
The only times I've had driver issues with Linux were back in the mid-'90s on a no-name-brand motherboard (SiS chipset), and with a parallel-port Umax scanner. No-name hardware is probably always going to be problematic, but I don't think it's really the Linux developers' job to compensate for people being too mean to buy proper hardware, however often they get lucky.
This aside, I am continually amazed at how well most distributions support all kinds of devices out of the box, with no user intervention required at all. I can't say that for any Windows version I have tried.
Re:Did they publish the source? (Score:2, Interesting)
they allocate 3GB of HDD space and use that for the linux distro.
they only give the modified source of bits of the kernel and vanilla for the rest. you cant compile it.
also its not sold on anything other than an annual subscription. you can never own it. and it only supports a few obsolete laptops.
Re:Hrm (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you've got a skewed perspective.
I'm assuming here that you're some sort of administrator or something. Based on that assumption I offer this perspective: Your job only exists to enable them to do theirs. You're a meta-worker, they're the workers. Certainly there is some allowance for pride in your work in that it's "your" network or "your" computers, but you're really only there to enable them. Without them, you wouldn't be necessary. As long as you keep that in mind, everyone benefits.
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
even mass storage devices can be a pain these days in windows (u3 tools anyone?) and xp doesn't like multiple partitions on a usb stick (had to hack the drivers to make windows think it was a hard drive to be able to access the second partition, even though both partitions were fat32).
Re:Games in the Windows VM? (Score:2, Interesting)
ummm that was my point.
Traditionally there is a BIOS which provides low level hardware access to a host OS which can then run a guest VM.
With Hyperspace the line between the BIOS and the host OS are blurred...
Does the guest Windows VM (it's running on a hypervisor) get low level access to the hardware?
If it does then gaming should work fine but it would be unlikely that multiple guests could be run simultaneously.
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had most of this in the 70s. It was called the Tandy Model I, and the entire OS was on a chip. There were never any driver problems because you couldn't install drivers. It was instant on (and by instant I mean faster than the CRT/TV it was connected to).
We've come so far .... :P
Oh, and 4K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody. ;)
Re:SplashTop (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder how much Microsoft (and/or other nefarious agencies. RIAA I'm looking at you) spends on shilling forums like slashdot?
Consider it targeted advertising, trying to influence the hearts and minds of people opposed to you (or silence the loudest). I have seen quite a bit of snide but clever comeback messages of late and have been downmodded (or down-metamodded) so much that I no longer get mod points (though my karma is still good). Its not that difficult to become a recogniseable username on slashdot (vastly more readers than posters) and I wonder how large a group of professional posters (with several aliases each) permanently on the job it would take to make a difference..
Or perhaps I'm just paranoid?
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Latest example is a webcam that I pulled out of my spare parts box for a project. Windows demanded the driver disk (which I didn't have) and couldn't find anything when I told it to go searching on the web. Ubuntu recognized it immediately and the driver was already on the system... instant joy. Gave up on Windows... another reason to delete Windows on my last remaining Windows computer.
I also hear lots of stories about WiFi not working but I have installed Linux on about 15 laptops (internal and external WiFi adapters) over the past few years and WiFi has "just worked" on all of them.
Everything old . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Daengbo mentioned above (vis a vis Tandy PC's from the '70's) that this is the way personal computers used to work.
Weren't the Macs and Ataris from the 1980's similar, utilizing a dedicated chip for the gui ("Apple toolbox")?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it does seem like everything old is "newer" again.
Re:The Achilles heel of this... (Score:4, Interesting)
a) A is a bogus concept. A specification amounts to an interface and really doesn't reveal much of anything about the internal workings of the hardware. With or without a specification you can bet a competitor with a multi-million dollar interest in how your hardware works will acquire that information anyway. So while selling hardware to the technically elite crowd that makes the major hardware purchase recommendations on big ticket accounts might not be a significant incentive to hardware manufacturers there really is no downside.
b) You could make that arguement except that there are no shortage of manufacturers that DO make their specs available and the result is that Linux has dramatically superior driver support for that hardware than any other operating system. Take a system with 10 year old hardware and load up ubuntu on it, everything will work out of the box. The popularity issue is self solving, if something isn't popular its because not many people use it or need it. If it was once popular but is no longer popular then the driver will have stabilized while it was.
c) I fail to see the motivation NOT to release quality specifications. Again specifications are how to communicate with the hardware, not how the hardware actually works. The only reason to misrepresent a spec is because the company is doing something shady like maladjusting drivers to give gains on gaming benchmarks at the expense of overall performance and so forth. If they really want to do this they can just release specs that say those maladjusted configurations are the optimal settings for the hardware. Problem solved. Otherwise, why wouldn't you want your hardware to perform as well as it could on a given system.
Actually since linux remains a tech heavy system, it seems to me that even hardware that is being under driven in software, perhaps to enable the sale of the same hardware at different price points would be best run at full unlocked specs in the linux driver anyway. This will give linux users a very favorable view of the hardware. While linux users may be a small percentage of the market, they are the geeks that make recommendations listened to by purchasing managers and by the early adopters who spend the real bucks.
If say, nvidia graphics cards give screaming performance on my linux box and ati cards suck and both have drivers... guess which cards I'm going to have a high opinion of and recommend to my clients?
Re:Where Open Source Works and where it doesn't (Score:3, Interesting)
But that problem is solved by the same reason many manufacturers have ignored Linux up till now. The size of the market. The Linux market by itself just really isn't all that significant, so let them keep their old stuff. Let them hack away at the hardware and if they come up with something so fantastic that someone will switch to linux to do it then all the better because they will need to buy your product to do the hack.
The linux market is not important for sales in the linxu market, its important because everyone outside the linux market is listening to the geeks who make up that market for their purchasing decisions. Even if they call up their local linux geek directly, the information and recommendations filter down from there.
Don't believe me? Find that to be difficult to track and so disregard it? Fine but look at what happened to Vista when the geeks decided it wasn't any good. The windows techs defended it and your average idiot on the street wouldn't know a slow or lousy system if you beat him to death with it. It was the linux/bsd/oss geeks here on slashdot who have to work with windows on the job all day who determined that system was garbage and a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank and a monopoly to back them was stopped in their tracks.
That is serious influence and buying power my friend billions of dollars worth, even if they aren't the ones actually spending the money. Another example is AMD, AMD was nobody until they 'dispelled the gigahertz myth' and in so doing pleased the geeks. The t-birds they came out with thereafter were good chips but the athlon XP's that came after that were garbage. Intel had to pull ahead for a significant time period to geeks paying attention to them again. The rest of the world? They didn't know a damn thing either way. They asked their local mcse, who takes his advice from internet tech forums, whose chief gurus take command of internet havens based on merit, and who wins when credentials don't count and only merit in techs?
The old school geeks running oss.