MSI plans EFI BIOS based motherboards

[HEXUS]

EFI, Extensible Firmware Interface, is intended to replace the old legacy BIOS firmware interface that we've all become accustomed to. Today, MSI announced plans to adopt EFI on its next generation of motherboards.

Read more.

[Agent]

Meh. I'd prefer to see their work be put into LinuxBIOS over EFI.
Can't see much chance of it though as I'd imagine a lot of the stuff on the board is under a NDA.

[MSIC]

I think this is great, was reading about it just now on Trusted Reviews. As they say, MSI (and then all the rest who will surely follow) will have to ensure not to alienate the majority of customers who won't know better, and i reckon they'll have to have an old-fashioned BIOS there too, probably set as default, with perhaps some sort of physical switch so that people can deliverately choose EFI?
Well that's what i'd do.

@ Agent - Linux would be interesting, as ASUS i believe has already tried, but even Linux may be over the top for most purposes (well, perhaps not the kernel but certainly any distro i've seen). I think EFi appears to be the way to go.
Edit: Just re-read what you wrote - saw you mentioned LinuxBIOS, sorry. Never heard of that before..time for some googling action...

Any bets on the first EFi virus?

[nichomach]

Any bets on how long it takes to be used for homebrewed "Macs"?

[directhex]

EFI isn't new - it's what intel macs, and itanium kit, uses

including BIOS compatibility isn't hard, that's how bootcamp on macs works - the bigger question is about MBR compatibility. does it finally mean a move to GPT partitions? what about keeping old OSes - will there be tools for syncing GPT and MBR partition tables (vista sp1 boots direct from GPT, i believe)

[Agent]

Any bets on how long it takes to be used for homebrewed "Macs"?

Considering its been 'hacked' to run on legacy BIOS's, I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there already has it running on a non-Mac hardware EFI board.

[kalniel]

Wow, we're finally moving out of the dark ages.