Tag Archives: Google custom BIOS
The Secret To a Ten Second Boot: Eliminate BIOS?
Posted on 28. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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Do you ever find yourself sitting around waiting for your computer to boot? While I always seem to hear about the newest computers having faster boot times, I never have perceived any sort of difference in speed. Along with using solid state drives, the next generation of computers is supposedly going to eliminate the decades-old BIOS startup system which is essentially software that talks directly to your hardware prior to operating system startup.
Witness this test by some Lenovo engineers. As far as I can tell, no special effects were involved, although one may consider that to be the case since this laptop boots up so fast.
The technology is called UEFI, which stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and one of the earliest OSs to support it was – surprise – Linux. While the Chromium site has no reference to UEFI, it sure is certain that the team is working on a custom BIOS. That means, according to this video, moving hardware initialization from the firmware to the kernel, among other optimizations.
