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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

BIOS is a good idea. It should have been expanded. For example I should be able to download Nvidia driver, install it into BIOS and then talk to it via standard interface (something like Vulkan). Now every operating system can just utilize that interface and use well tested driver from manufacturer, rather than ask manufacturer to write that driver for every operating system.

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> install it into BIOS and then talk to it via standard interface

Isn't that how it's worked since forever? The graphics card already comes with a driver in a flash ROM chip, the BIOS installs it during boot, and programs can talk to it through the standard INT 10h interface. AFAIK, modern graphics cards also already come with an EFI driver in the same flash ROM chip, which the BIOS installs during boot when in EFI mode, and EFI programs and operating systems can talk to it through standard EFI interfaces.

"Via Standard Interface" I don't think you can gloss over the differences between say DirectX and Metal that easily. Maybe you're arguing they should be gotten rid of, but I think that's rather pie in the sky.

That’s a nice idea, but the history of graphics APIs and drivers suggests otherwise. The path between the hardware and the application has only gotten shorter and more direct, not less.

You just described [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

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