Something I recently joked about doing was porting SDL to the UEFI environment and then building DOSBOX for it. I’m sure someone has already done this in some fashion, but the idea was amusing enough for me to genuinely consider it one of these weekends. I guess in that case, though, you can’t really run FreeDOS.
You are correct - it is basically used as a back door.
Most devices, even in your computer (eg: laptop battery) run an OS. There's a good talk somewhere on how we've lost our way with OS design and now need to write an OS that looks at a single machine as a distributed system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
Edit or this one (not a talk but a paper)?
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-shan.pdf
LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation ... We propose a new OS model called the splitkernel to manage disaggregated systems. Splitkernel disseminates traditional OS functionalities into loosely-coupled mon- itors, each of which runs on and manages a hardware component
That generation of laptops can detect a problem with the battery much earlier (e.g. It can warn the user a year before the battery starts to swell. Been there, seen that). This knowledge is the basis of apple's battery technology that we see on their mobiles (iOS and macOS) today.
IIRC the password on these things were set to a default one and a PoC exploit was written for that platform.
[0]: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
[1]: https://i.blackhat.com/us-18/Wed-August-8/us-18-Valadon-Reve...
Exactly, currently they are too easily exploitable because they are not joined up.
You see it with gpu's being hacked and the OS not recognising this.
Not unlike "Other OS" on PS3. Same theory, different application.