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Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

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Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#21

Post by AStonesThrow »

skissane wrote: post #12
mmastrac wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... uhh, not really. :)

Microsoft owns GitHub, and GitHub is crawling with Windows source code leaks… and I’m wondering it anyone at Microsoft really cares? Is it possible they’ve even made an intentional decision just to ignore it? If it were an Oracle source code leak, I expect they’d have a crack team of lawyers suing people 24x7 until it was all gone… maybe that’s why there haven’t (to my knowledge) been any Oracle source code leaks (I…

When I started college in 1989, my Pascal programming class used a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. I poked around those systems like crazy over the course of two quarters. I don't remember if there was any significant source code exposed to unprivileged users.

During the mid-90s, the Unix Wars were raging and Unix System Labs was suing U.C. Berkeley over the intellectual property of Unix source code. Unix had been written at AT&T Bell Labs, but Berkeley had licensed and forked their own, based on improved networking code, and by this time it was ready to run on i386 systems. In fact, USL had borrowed back some BSD code, allegedly without crediting them. Berkeley had been busy removing AT&T code and replacing it, so they could relicense BSD Unix.

USL, part of AT&T (but later purchased by Novell), contended that Berkeley could not easily make a "clean room implementation" of any kernel code or device drivers, if those programmers had read or worked with original AT&T source code. They told the courts (and journalists) that the programmers might be tempted to reproduce proprietary Unix code, consciously or subconsciously, and therefore, these programmers were permanently "Mentally Contaminated" and Berkeley should not be allowed to continue distributing BSD [BSDi] Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

So when I attended Usenix LISA in 1994, this 3-year lawsuit was at a fever pitch, and someone on the convention floor had manufactured large buttons for attendees to wear, proudly proclaiming "MENTALLY CONTAMINATED", and all the admins and systems programmers had a good laugh about the absurdity of trying to keep a lid on proprietary source code by policing everyone who's ever seen one of its files.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#23

Post by mintsuki »

LukeShu wrote: post #7

Very cool hack. But, as okanat says, if the goal is to run legacy operating systems, then modern hardware is going to be challenging in other ways too. IME the biggest thing I want PC BIOS back for is the ability to use non-GPT disk layouts, which this doesn't accomplish as, as to use it you put it on the EFI partition on your GPT disk.

By spec, UEFI is required to support both MBR and GPT, so there is literally nothing stopping you from using MBR.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#24

Post by aspenmayer »

michaelmrose wrote: post #19
adiabatichottub wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they? They have bulk licensing deals with PC OEMs and large organizations. They've already got the big money. J. Random Hacker building a PC isn't even a rounding error to them.

Quite right in fact limited weak copyright protection helps retain marketshare that might be lost otherwise especially when that weak protection in fact costs little real revenue.

It looks even smarter from the MS side when you think of all the threat intel that they gather from pirated Windows installs that can be used as a baseline to compare legit installs against.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#25

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

okanat wrote: post #4
p_ing wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOS. Can’t think of any other reason.

You get better DOS emulation with DOSBox, rather than trying to make the modern peripherals work on a CSM / BIOS system.

DOSBox doesn't give access to real hardware. DOSemu doesn't run well on 64-bit machines. If you need unfettered hardware access, FreeDOS on the bare machine is the best option.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#26

Post by userbinator »

adiabatichottub wrote: post #18
jsheard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft owns GitHub, and GitHub is crawling with Windows source code leaks… and I’m wondering it anyone at Microsoft really cares? Even weirder is that GitHub hosts all of the tools for activating (i.e. cracking) modern versions of Windows and Office as well. Microsoft really doesn't care.

Why should they? They have bulk licensing deals with PC OEMs and large organizations. They've already got the big money. J. Random Hacker building a PC isn't even a rounding error to them.

Also, they still get the ad revenue and telemetry if you pirate Windows and otherwise leave it stock.

...of which the tools to disable that invasiveness are also on GitHub, so maybe they just care more about maintaining marketshare.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#27

Post by userbinator »

This is like the reverse of the bootloaders first pioneered by the Hackintosh community to boot UEFI macOS on traditional BIOS systems.

and VESA VBIOS from SeaBIOS project

Unfortunately I believe modern GPUs without a standard VBIOS may not act enough like an IBM VGA for a generic VGA VBIOS to work, so I see another project for someone in the future: a retrofit VBIOS, especially for those GPUs e.g. Intel's for which lots of open-source driver code and documentation is available but later models no longer come with a VBIOS.

Perhaps also injecting a true CSM from an old closed-source UEFI BIOS, before they started removing it, is worth doing as in my limited experience SeaBIOS isn't as quite compatible as the closed-source ones for some edge-cases.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#28

Post by mjg59 »

userbinator wrote: post #27

This is like the reverse of the bootloaders first pioneered by the Hackintosh community to boot UEFI macOS on traditional BIOS systems. and VESA VBIOS from SeaBIOS project Unfortunately I believe modern GPUs without a standard VBIOS may not act enough like an IBM VGA for a generic VGA VBIOS to work, so I see another project for someone in the future: a retrofit VBIOS, especially for those GPUs e.g. Intel's for which…

It's actually pretty much the same as the project to get Windows running on Intel Macs before Apple released Boot Camp

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#29

Post by mycall »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #25
okanat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get better DOS emulation with DOSBox, rather than trying to make the modern peripherals work on a CSM / BIOS system.

DOSBox doesn't give access to real hardware. DOSemu doesn't run well on 64-bit machines. If you need unfettered hardware access, FreeDOS on the bare machine is the best option.

What about using PCem? It does well emulating real hardware.

Re: Get PC BIOS back on UEFI only system

#30

Post by LukeShu »

LukeShu wrote: post #7

Very cool hack. But, as okanat says, if the goal is to run legacy operating systems, then modern hardware is going to be challenging in other ways too. IME the biggest thing I want PC BIOS back for is the ability to use non-GPT disk layouts, which this doesn't accomplish as, as to use it you put it on the EFI partition on your GPT disk.

Too late to edit: non-GPT, non-MBR

For instance, whole-disk btrfs. Or old BSD partition schemes.

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