Replying to Avatar Danie

Modder made an IRC client that runs entirely inside the motherboard's BIOS chip

Phillip Tennen, developer of the open-source axleOS, has recently decided to use what he learned from that project to create an IRC client that runs entirely within the UEFI pre-boot environment, with no operating system required. This "UEFIRC" is nearly fully functional, with a graphical interface and a TrueType font renderer, and it's all written in the Rust programming language.

Wow! It does suggest two things to me:

1. IRC is really the lightest weight social chatting app of them all...

2. IRC users are a bit different...

Technically I suppose any text based micro-blogging type service could work. Twitter or Mastodon without videos and photos may also work. But the nature of how IRC still works today, means you can get a pretty close experience to the real thing even in the BIOS.

See https://www.tomshardware.com/software/someone-made-a-functioning-irc-client-that-runs-entirely-inside-the-motherboards-uefi

#technology #IRC #BIOS

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The Beave 1y ago

WTF! Why?

Also... If you can do that in the bios chip... Every effing mobo these days is way too powerful and all programming is just bloated to such a degree that is a horrific waste of time and resources. Even Linux is chonky.

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Danie 1y ago

The answer is usually "why not" ;-) There is rarely any practical reason to do something like this. Supposedly DOOM can also play in the BIOS - only use I can think of is if you have an unbootable PC.

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The Beave 1y ago

Sure... Why not?

But gosh... That's kinda silly. Not bad, just silly m