this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Software Gore

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This was a Lenovo. Now I'm wondering if Windows or Linux has a better BIOS.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The BIOS is an operating system, albeit a super low level one. What is wrong here? It would only be software gore if it said that it was part of the windows operating system, since the BIOS is a system operating system.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Only thing that's really off is that most people don't need to update BIOS with any frequency, if at all, given the potential for ruining your PC. I certainly wouldn't trust my parents with doing it on their own.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Unless a major bios vulnerability has been identified that bypasses TPM and secure boot on Windows machines......

Hopefully vendors like Lenovo have a bulletproof BIOS update pathway, and automatic fallback to the last bios of something goes wrong. Kind of like phone updates

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well my newish Lenovo work laptop is failing its BIOS update with the helpful error message that power is not plugged in (it is) or user cancelled (user did not) or another error (yay!)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Have you checked it's actually plugged in though?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I feel like security issues should be adressed its just best practice and IME most modern mobos have backups to prevent catastrophic failure

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

It's right there in the name:

Basic Input Output Operating System

It's the first stage of whatever os you run.

If you don't think the BIOS is part of your operating system, just remove it and see how far you get on the next boot.

Edit: I was always told the I in BIOS was "I/O". WAS I DECEIVED FOR ALL THIS TIME!?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (2 children)

BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System.

Semantically sure, it's making your system operate, but it's technically part of your motherboard's firmware.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's the underlying system. You can run tiny bare metal programs in your boot sector that simply call bios functions to output to the screen and write to disk and beep the speaker, just like you can call functions to the windows or Linux kernels to do the same.

Although granted the only functions called these days are to set the CPU to protected mode and goodbye BIOS until the next boot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

hmm. it's a good point. it seems to me though that that just isn't what "operating system" refers to, since these programs can't actually manage the system in a meaningful way or do anything you'd really expect from an OS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

But circling back to OP's screenshot it only mentions that it's part of the OS. A pretty small part these days compared to DOS, but it's still doing stuff.

I guess it comes down to whether you consider all the initialisation/bootstrap/hardware configuration routines to be part of an operating system.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Which is Operating System too, just not windows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

"Operating system" has a specific meaning and BIOS isn't one.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Chant it with me.... BIOOOOOOS haha.

There should be a slash in there.

Basic Input/Output Operating System.

At least, that's what I was taught it was many decades ago.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So if you got a Linux/win dual boot setup, then Linux is part of Windows?

I don't think so

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Considering that when an uninstaller fails, and taking ownership of the broken files to remove them doesn't seem to help, so you have to boot into Linux to forcibly remove them because Windows doesn't let you do it, yes, it is part of Windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

One truth, one lie in the title. Guess which one's which.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I mean it is part of the System running on that machine. So it is technically part of the OS?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I'm having a crisis here thinking about this lol. It's a part of the system that is your machine if you consider the system to be the entire use of the computer. But it is not a part of the operating system on the drive. It's a lower level operating system that identifies your hardware's capabilities and functionality and has sets of instructions on how to boot from your storage. Computers are really just many many layers of abstraction. Separating the abstractions into layers gets pretty complex. But if you create a virtual OS inside of your storage device's OS, it is its own OS. It has no knowledge that it's a virtual machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

If you asked somebody which operating system they were using they would say Linux or Windows etc. The BIOS is not part of these.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I feel like their goal was to dumb it down and that they could have done that without misinformation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

My man right here gets it :)