[ltp] Can you trust your firmware?

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Marc Lagies wrote:
> are there any open source alternatives to the IBM/Lenovo BIOS firmware  
> available? I would enjoy to compile the BIOS firmware by myself.

None.  And it is no joke of a BIOS, either.  Half the stuff the ThinkPad
BIOS is doing to a running machine is through SMIs.  Almost everything we
ask the ACPI system to do results in SMIs...

There is zero chance you will ever change a laptop BIOS with an Open BIOS,
unless the laptop is *designed* for the Open BIOS in the first place.

> I wonder about how much confidence I can have into my computer system if  
> such a crucial(?) component like the BIOS firmware is proprietary source  
> code?

You can't have any.  A BIOS in SMI mode can do anything it wants, and the OS
won't even know it happened.

If you need that level of confidence, you will have to get someone to design
an open-BIOS laptop.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh