Jessica

at the hardware company I last worked for, I spent some time working on getting the open source version of memtest working as an EFI executable inside the ESP (EFI System Partition). this turned out to not be terribly difficult because the standard build process compiles an .efi file as part of it, which is just a straight-up EFI executable that requires no further modification. the tricky part was 1) making sure various boot menus and loaders etc could find it, and 2) setting up tooling to let us update the executable in the ESP from within the regular OS

I left the company before I got things working to a point where the People Who Make Decisions could decide to push the thing out or not, but one of these days I may go back to it as a personal project since being able to install memtest on a PCI and then boot to it without writing it to a USB stick first is a huge deal for people who troubleshoot hardware. (yes, Windows has a memory testing tool built in but it’s kind of garbo)

UEFI is fucking crazy in terms of what you can do with it. sadly, the people most interested in doing stuff with it these days are either the sort of desperate corporate mooks you talked about, or malware authors

so this makes me think about a largely unrelated thing:

HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc see themselves as Full Stack Hardware Companies.

And I speculate that they see non-fleet laptops and desktops as diversification, but in reality it means you have to do some ruthless competition with laptop-only manufacturers that are now popping up the last 5 years. Apple made the jump already -- most of it's desktops are laptop boards, or at least laptop components. (Non-upgradability being a motive is for another thread)

and it also means you need to keep current on the gaming trends, and what normal people are hyped about with technology, to sell them.

Whereas I bet they'd do a lot better if they ceded that ground and became the "Need 10+ laptops Keyed Alike? We've got you."

We sort of saw this when thin clients took off, but they never replaced Consumer Desktops, for obvious reasons (People don't have a terminal server etc).

I wonder what happens when they realize they're the Mozilla of laptops, separate and competing not for innovation, but because if any of them fail there's going to be a duopoly

i take your point about motherboards doing nothing but i want to note that there is 1 thing that they could do to differentiate themselves - diagnostics. the motherboard manufacturer already has to bodge a dozen different microprocessors (and sensors that contain microprocessors) and write (or reuse) firmware for all of them. they're in the perfect position to present the fine details of the machine to both the OS once booted and the user pre-boot. i just had to diagnose why a machine wasn't booting and all they allotted to this task was 4 fucking LEDs! and they only did that because the chipset probably has dedicated IO for them, because every other board with the same chipset has the same LEDs (don't worry, each vendor makes up a marketing name for them so you can't correlate problems across boards). higher-end boards have a whole 2-digit 7-segment display with borderline useless codes.

the high-grade stuff that Actually Needs To Work boots a full ass separate computer, the BMC, to monitor this stuff. this is stupid for other reasons, mostly that there's now a secret, second linux running on the box that can be compromised and Doesn't Fucking Work. ironically, i think Phoenix mostly writes the software for BMCs these days because as you've noted BIOS is kinda a solved problem. boards with BMCs are completely out of the reach of consumers though, workstation boards that support it like this one from ASUS cost as much as an entire computer (because that's what is is, partly).

even if someone sold a consumer-grade board with good pre- and post-boot diagnostics i'm not sure it would ever get much reach outside of enthusiasts. but it would be nice.

"HP writes an EFI email/calendar application with special bodges for Outlook compatibility, pulls open and abuses an unacknowledged level of access built into the hardware ages ago to beat Windows to the punch and claw out a fucking calendar into the windows boot screen just to maks their little netbook marginally more appealing to business guys who only ever use Outlook" is not what i expected to learn about today but exactly the kind of thing i was hoping for

Every motherboard I've ever bought has made me regret it down the line in one way or another (starting with the first PC I ever built, an ASRock Sandy Bridge that on shutdown if the USB drivers weren't messed with would have some kind of bizarre power backflow that turned the machine back on again). These are at least interesting dysfunctions instead of "why did they install a tiny GPU fan that dies after a month and emits rattling noises that can be heard across my apartment" or "UEFI doesn't work with any OS but the first one installed". :(

Eh, I'm sure they have those faults too.

Gigabyte was putting gun shaped heatsinks on their motherboards for a while which was really funny

This was a journey, holy shit.

https://gekk.info/articles/images/quickweb/daystarter-3.jpg

I can't tell if this is a REAL slide or a crafty sarcastic post. I fear it is likely real, despite the overuse of the word "innovation".

i sometimes think i overengineer too much but hats off. this is completely insane

I thought the EFI Outlook clone was already a security nightmare, but uhhh...as soon as I saw the letters "SMM" I was floored. What the actual fuck...

God I'm so glad shit like that is dead and buried.

So, thinking about the fact that most of these laptops come with a load of "value add" software pre bundled with Windows and it's absolutely terrible, RAM wasting garbage of no utility to anyone anywhere.

I do find it very strange that nobody seems to have ever tried making that bundled software good instead of bad.

"HP bought it, but then seemingly junked all the demon-haunted helltech" you mean I made this popcorn for nothing?

"System Management Mode" sickos_yesssss

what asus board came with the nuclear launch drive bay? i couldnt find anything that looked like that online but it sounds amazing

Each of your posts is more horrifying than the last.

I barely speak computers well enough to follow along but thank you, kind stranger, because the screams of the damned ripple off the page well enough for me to follow the curse payload just fine.

I am extremely inclined to agree (for psychology/having-met-humans-before reasons) with your The One Stupid Lever You Can Pull reasoning.

Couple notes:

• I think we're down to something like Ring -3 by now. Possibly more.
• Microwave ovens are a great analogy to the whole differentiation thing; the optimal form was invented decades ago, so the only way to differentiate in the market is to make things worse.

I believe Ron Minnich said it, SMM is fully explained by the desire to run DOS 1.0 (e.g. on a laptop). DOS 1.0 doesn't know how to measure temperature or control fans, put some code in SMM to do it. DOS 1.0 doesn't know USB keyboards, trap keyboard I/O port access to SMM and emulate it there. DOS 1.0 doesn't know USB storage, trap disk access to SMM and emulate that. DOS 1.0 doesn't know about volume buttons... SMM. etc. etc.

How feasible would it be to dump the SMM-level firmware from this? Now I'm deadly curious whether there's some kind of fun 0day in the JPEG loader or something. Getting ring -2 code execution on a decade-old shittop would be hilarious.