"Intel is pleased to announce the BIOS Implementation Test Suite, a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS."
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Member since:2005-07-24
It's a BIOS validation suite, essentially. It allows board makers & kernel/driver developers to communicate more efficiently by permitting kernel/driver developers access to standard hardware initialization code from Intel in lieu of whatever code is being used by the motherboard used for development.
This is really just a way to keep motherboard venders from straying from the Intel reference by too much, which has advantages for stability and disadvantages for some forms of innovation.
This won't be replacing the BIOS, but may prove useful in running certain OSes on motherboards with non-standard BIOS setups ( read: Haiku ), though that really depends on the overall flexibility of the test suite.
Interjecting custom code would prove useful for only a select few, namely those I've mentioned.
Not really a platform selling point, IMHO.
--The loon
Member since:2010-05-19
Member since:
2010-05-19
This is a pretty awesome bootloader.
If it can indeed completely bypass the bios, I'm now settled on Core i# for my next mobo.