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These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer own
by dajt 9y ago
These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer owner control, more vendor control.
As long as you can still run the OS of your choice at the top of this stack of vendor OSs, what do the vendors gain by this 'land grab'? Particularly the HW vendors. I can imagine Apple and MS are happy to lock things down so only their OSs run easily but What benefit does any HW vendor get from from UEFI? Surely the benefit to Intel from IME is being able to say "you can remotely manage and recover a borked server if you have our IME enabled", but I can't think what else it gives them.
I like the idea of a system running hardware that does the minimum of initialisation before running code of the user's choice but that is more due to my being an 8-bit kid and worries of buggy vendor blobs than assuming the HW vendors are being nefarious.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gatmne 9y ago> What do the vendors gain by this 'land grab'? One thing is that it could be used to as a venue to pursue new recurring revenue streams. While not exactly the same thing, I've seen some people joke about intel locking owners from cpu features behind monthly subscriptions. This kind of exploitation requires disallowing owners from fully controlling their devices in order to be effective. The more control vendors have, the more elaborate and exploitative these schemes can be, and the less likely owners will be able to do anything about it.
- whyagaindavid 9y agoWell said. I remember a cheaper model of Sony laptop in which you cannot enable hyperthreading though it had same chipset of an expensive model.