B.I.O.S. to lock out non-Windows code ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 07:11:37PM +0200, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Justin Zygmont wrote:
> 
> > why not assembly?  I thought most bioses were written in that.
> 
> Were. Maintaining ~128k of assembly is everyone's nightmare. Now it seems
> to be a mixture of C, code generators and assembly. I do not write BIOSes
> ;-)

They also don't seem to be 128K anymore.

At least some now have 256K BIOS chips, which have compressed code in
them that decompresses at boot to do the self test, then blows itself
away, and the bios setup program is also compressed and will decompress
and load when needed.  Only the code that has to be called at runtime by
DOS and such, has to actually be in the chip in a readable form, which I
think on most systems account for 32KB or less.  On my 486 it is about
23K.

Lennart Sorensen
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