[getcrunk]

Hopefully this will spur more research and visibility and unfortunately active exploits, but that would finally put pressure on oems to secure their firmwares. Or break up the damn covert cabal that’s the 3 major bios producers

[userbinator]

Be careful what you wish for, as the overwhelming purpose of discovered exploits will be to give freedom to the rightful owners of devices.

[prmoustache]

At the very least I find it comforting that whenever I need to enter the bios on one of my thinkpad I get a snappy keyboard driven interface that barely changed in 30 years.

I'll take that anyday over that slow as hell mouse driven firmware horror Dell and HP have been producing for their servers and laptops.

[p_l]

The nice thing about UEFI is that the build-in "UI framework" means you can get UI from oproms this way as well.

It also means you can bypass the mouse driven monstrosities from at least Dell by booting with console on serial port (for example through IPMI) - and all the same options are available, in vt-100 compatible form.

What relief after finding a server where the base bios was fine, but the intel raid card had its own SVGA+PS/2 mouse requiring setup interface... The mad scramble for a mouse to add to crash cart...

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Or break up the damn covert cabal that’s the 3 major bios producers

I'm curious about that - why isn't there more competition, especially when everything you need to do it without them is easily available online? Like, not just specs, all the actual code you'd need is open source and AIUI friendly to use. Frankly, why aren't most motherboards shipping with lightly-patched coreboot+edk2?

[Rinzler89]

>I'm curious about that - why isn't there more competition

Because like most consumer PC parts, it's a race to the bottom low margin low wage business, usually offshored to Asia, that's only remotely profitable for the top 2-3 players who captured the market and optimized the costs, processes, development and supply chain to the max.

Why would anyone else want to enter such a market to compete for even lower profits?

[LtdJorge]

Most, if not all, consumer motherboard manufacturers are Asian themselves (Taiwan)

[Rinzler89]

Sure, but must major BIOS manufacturers, Award, Phoenix, AMI are American AFAIK.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Don't forget the co-inventor of EFI (along with Intel), Insyde...

[LtdJorge]

AMI sure is, says it right in the name, lol