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09-22-2009, 02:53 PM
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Tiger
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 306
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I just found out that my laptop uses H2O UEFI.
UEFI emulates old BIOS... I found this info about it, and the webpage for the UEFI development I think...
Anyone care to comment on what this is? Because I read that most manufacturers are going to adopt this thing big time (not from the quote below) - I had no idea I used it. My BIOS seems just like any other
http://www.uefi.org/home
Quote:
nabling Intel VT on the Aspire 8930G (and other InsydeH2O-based laptops)
It seems the ongoing trend for laptops is to integrate and hide as much as possible from the user. We’re all used to minimalistic crappy BIOS setups with two or three configuration options. However, things go way too far when OEMs remove options related to features that the hardware is capable of but which are disabled by default. This happens with Intel VT on many laptops – even if the CPU supports it, you may not be able to find the BIOS setup option to turn it on.
I certainly wanted to use a feature that I paid for, so I started investigating the BIOS and here’s what I found out.
Under the hood
The InsydeH2O BIOS is no ordinary old-style BIOS. Instead, it’s based around the UEFI platform. This goes way beyond the old BIOS paradigm and turns system firmware into practically its own separate OS, that even runs in full 64-bit mode on 64-bit machines. Unfortunately, they make no effort to expose any of this to the user. The firmware has support for booting EFI executables, there’s an EFI shell, there’s an EFI boot manager… but I haven’t been able to figure out how to access any of this.
If you want to reverse engineer EFI stuff, downloading TianoCore’s EDK2 is a must. It contains source code for a lot of Intel’s framework, which is what most vendors use as a base for their EFI support. A lot of the code is exactly the same as what’s in the Insyde BIOS (read the spec here).
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Am I wrong, or can this be another loophole for even better hack support?
Last edited by Gurruwiwi; 09-22-2009 at 02:57 PM.
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