BIOS

What is a BIOS?

BIOS is an acronym for Basic Input/Output System.

"The fundamental purposes of the BIOS are to initialize and test the system hardware components, and to load a bootloader or an operating system from a mass memory device."

Read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS

BIOSes are software in certain circumstances. The FSF says:

"Today the BIOS sits square on the edge of the line. It comes pre-written in our computers, and normally we never install another. So far, that is just barely enough to excuse treating it as hardware. But once in a while the manufacturer suggests installing another BIOS, which is available only as an executable. This, clearly, is installing a non-free program [...]"

Read more on https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

White-lists

Whoever controls a proprietary BIOS can implement a hardware white-list. A white list is a pre-approved list of hardware components.

A vendor might implement a white-list to ensure that customers must go to him for parts (e.g.. a replacement Wi-Fi card). The approved parts may all require proprietary software -- or maybe not. The vendor controls which hardware parts you may use with his BIOS.

What's the problem?

Free BIOSes like gnuboot exist, but ...

They are currently only a few computers that gnuboot can run on you can check if you can install gnuboot on your machine here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/docs/hardware/

If your machine doesn’t support gnuboot or you don’t want the task of installing it yourself you can buy pre-configured gnuboot systems from https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/laptops for example. Follow the documentation Complete Systems for more information about complete systems and vendors.

Further Reading

Revisions

05/03/2014 - 22:58
muhammed
02/22/2015 - 21:35
tomlukeywood
11/25/2023 - 08:36
knife
02/20/2024 - 19:15
Luck-02