Some things that the BIOS does can't be re-done. For instance, Athlon 64 SMP configuration must be done by the BIOS and cannot be done after the kernel has been booted, like x86 MPS can. Other types of things absolutely have to be done at initialization time for you to even get to the kernel.LinuxBIOS project has the right idea by ideally cutting out as much cruft from the system firmware as possible and leaving it up to the OS to perform initialization, but in reality some tasks are forced onto the firmware by design.
Score:5, Interesting