eno2001's Journal: WiFi: Why?

I've been wondering recently... WHY is WiFi authentication left up to the OS instead of the BIOS? Picture this:

1. You turn on your laptop and go into it's BIOS or firmware.
2. There is a WiFi section in it where you can set your SSID and key if needed.
3. The BIOS or firmware then presents the WiFi device as a standard NIC to the OS (possibly based on a very well supported chipset)

At that point, ANY OS could have trouble free WiFi other than the possible inconvenience of having to reboot to get into the settings. Of course, the way things go, you know there would be a Windows utility to interact with that portion of the BIOS from within Windows and someone in the *nix world would hack one... ;P

very good idea

[Mantorp]

but I'm not geeky enough to tell you why nobody has done this already

I'll tell you...

[ratboy666]

It mostly because network booting was not a part of the "original" PC BIOS. And as a result, there were no Net services defined by Papa IBM. And the "clones" didn't implement such a thing as standard either.

Since there was no network packet standard layer, "wifi" didn't have such a thing to ride on.

Now, a lot of BIOSs do implement network booting (Intel PXES or BOOTP protocols). But there is still no standard interface. Instead, the bootp parameters have to be shoveled into the OS, which then re-implements