Posted by LaSombra 1 day ago
If I'm not mistaken, the "bare metal" part refers to how directly you can touch it once control passes to your code. So definitely qualifies imho.
Not whether a 'glorified bootloader' burned some CPU cycles before that.
The "bare metal" qualifier goes away if underlying OS prevents your code from touching the hardware directly.
Of course, I'm aware that doing actual hardware access on a complex platform such as x86 is massively complicated, which is why most bare-metal targets tend to use simpler platforms in the first place.
I did notice that the link in the main "menu" to part 5 actually goes to part 4, but you can still get to that final part via the "next part" link from the end of part 4.
If I start looking into the latest and greatest Qualcomm Nuvia ARM Windows laptops, does it use UEFI? Or regular BIOS?
Yes. It's extremely common.
> If I start looking into the latest and greatest Qualcomm Nuvia ARM Windows laptops, does it use UEFI?
Yes, those use UEFI.
> Or regular BIOS?
Almost nothing widely produced today uses old "regular BIOS". Even those which seem to use "regular BIOS" are largely UEFI systems acting like a legacy BIOS. Even things like Apple MacBooks which don't use EFI use an Apple custom similar firmware concept far removed from legacy BIOS.
Only kind of kidding. I imagine the future for a while will either be continued growth into proprietary firmware platforms (like Apple and how tons of other phones/tablets have done) or a reworking/adapting of the main concepts behind UEFI but maybe making it less like ancient Microsoft-like patterns. Potentially something like u-boot becoming more common, or things like LK (Little Kernel). I think we'll see more evolution instead of hard replacement of concepts.
Only 99% of all non-embedded computing products that are faster than a few hundred MHz.