[hakfoo]

I'm sort of amazed these days that we still have commercial BIOSes (well, UEFIs)

They're not a selling point, even for the enthusiasts who buy individual motherboards.

You'd think that that by now, the chipset vendors would provide a reference Coreboot image for each new platform, (which, since it would be more or less for debugging purposes, would have MAX OPTIONS) and then the motherboard manufacturers would do the bare minimum to cut off any features not relevant to their boards or swap in modules for whichever small technical deltas-- different audio chipsets or clock generators-- they actually make underneath the garish silkscreen and RGB strips.

[jeroenhd]

Motherboard manufacturers would much rather pay AMI or Insyde a non-insignificant amount of money to make all BIOS development go away.

They could hire people to do the work for them, but that'd require finding and vetting people with the necessary skills without the knowledge of how to do so. As long as BIOS manufacturers can sell their services for cheaper than setting up an extra firmware department, they'll do good business.

[winocm]

Honestly, if someone made a reference platform setup utility (and BDS initialization screen) for EFI systems with a familiar-ish UI and got it into upstream git, then I think a lot of the value add of commercial firmware would probably dissipate.

[hkgjjgjfjfjfjf]

Tianocore

[winocm]

That’s the reference UI, I’m referring to something more akin to whatever ships on motherboards these days.