Ubios: China's Alternative to UEFI | Hacker News Reader

Ubios: China's Alternative to UEFI

pbxscience.com

34 points1970-01-0120 comments

> As the United States has cut China off from advanced semiconductor technology, tightened controls on Chinese investments in U.S. firms, and scrutinized the flow of Chinese students and scholars to American universities, Beijing has stressed the need for indigenous innovation and to seize control of core technologies.

Sounds pretty self-defeating.

> UEFI provides advantages including faster boot times through parallel hardware initialization

My older BIOS motherboards boot far quicker than "modern" UEFI ones.

This article feels super AI written. It explains what a virtual bus is like like 6 times in different ways

> This article feels super AI written.

That struck me, too.

> It explains what a virtual bus is like like 6 times in different ways

Without ever actually really nailing down what the term means for software.

"UBIOS will be further discussed and revealed by the Global Computing Consortium at the 2025 Global Computing Conference in Shenzhen this November. For a country looking to both bolster its own domestic computing ecosystem and step away from American systems that constrict non-standard hardware implementations, the development of UBIOS may prove to be a major win for China. However, whether UBIOS becomes widely adopted and championed like the open standard RISC-V, or widely abandoned like LoongArch, remains to be seen."

https://news.mydrivers.com/1/1081/1081504.htm

It doesn’t need to be widely adopted. Sometimes countries intentionally maintain different standards.

As an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_of_gauge

6 months later, researchers found that this was sending data back home and had hardcoded security keys

> Technical Maturity: The UEFI Forum updated all three of its core specifications (ACPI, UEFI, and PI) as recently as December 2024.

Updates are not a sign of technical maturity. You don't change the door to your house every year.

Where have you been for the last decade? These days if a project isn't updated at least biweekly it's considered abandoned rotting garbage

But can it also run a full IP stack? [Rhetorical]

More competetion always welcome.

Few weeks back they had HDMI/DisplayPort alternate standardized as well.

I’d honestly would like to read bcantrill’s opinion on this

I'm not Bryan but this sounds like the same over-abstracted architecture astronaut approach as UEFI. It's the compete opposite of Oxide's firmware.

Bingo: forcing UEFI and D-Bus to breed in captivity is antithetical to our approach of holistic boot.[0][1]

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0241

[1] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...

Getting rid of the BIOS sounds awesome. I assume that means that it gets rid of code running the SMM, which can prevent invisible code from sapping performance from the machine for no apparent reason. For example, on recent AMD machines, such as my Zen 3 machine, memory bandwidth measured by ZFS' checksum algorithms will randomly drop by a significant percentage and there is no obvious reason why, although I suspect patrol scrubs are involved.

That begs the question. What does the patrol scrubs of ECC memory on your hardware?

This seems utterly bizarre.

It’s one thing to make a new firmware for PCs…

But they really don’t care about Linux or Windows? Or do they expect each to cave and support their thing because they make the world’s crap?

They simply could have written their own UEFI implementation if they so desired…

This feels more like a flex to the rest of the world than anything useful.

> But they really don’t care about Linux or Windows?

They are both US products, subject to export controls.

Linux is not a "US product" what the hell are you even talking about?

You mean the thing started by a Swedish guy living in Finland?

Aside from the previous 2 comments refuting this for Linux, I'd point out the multiple Chinese Linux distros that have been around for years now.

Deepin/Uniontech UOS -- based on Debian.

It has its own desktop environment, DDE, available on some Western distros and pretty good.

Kylin/OpenKylin/Ubuntu Kylin -- based on Ubuntu.

Again, its own desktop, UKUI, also available on Ubuntu itself and a few other distros.

EulerOS/OpenEuler -- based on CentOS Linux, and one of only 2 distros to have held official UNIX™ certification.

The other being Inspur K/UX, also Chinese I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com