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UEFI Formed to Replace BIOS
anonymous cow-herd writes "Businesswire reports that several leading technology companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell and HP and others have formed the Unified EFI Forum. The non-profit corporation will assume responsibility for the development and promotion of the EFI specification, a pre-boot interface originally developed by Intel that is intended to replace the aging PC BIOS."
Read more about EFI here.
It doesnt adapt well to serial consoles..
It has limitations on which parts of the disk it can boot from..
It's not scriptable..
It can't be configured in any ways other than what the "setup" program makes available to you..
OpenFirmware as used by SUN is much nicer, you can run diagnostics, write scripts, and get some low level information about the hardware attached... You can control the whole system from a serial console easily, and even install the OS from there..
You can also explicitely boot from any partition on your disk, instead of requiring a bootloader in the MBR to do the selection for you.
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The source code for Intel's implementation of EFI can be found at http://www.tianocore.org/
Also, this standard should finally allow seemless integration of new hardware onto the linux desktop. The main hurdle for desktop linux has always been lack of seemless driver integration.
And there's a link on the main page of the Intel EFI page.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
What's wrong with the PC BIOS anyway? ... On a more sinister note, there's no mention in TFA of DRM and the idea of "trusted" computing.
According to the Overview page, Microsoft's listed as the only OS maker. First, why isn't Apple among the lineup? Novell? Red Hat Linux? Perhaps it's because they're not part of the real circle of friends...
Enter Microsoft's Trusted Computer Platform. According to the TCPA FAQ, the companies belonging to the alliance are: "Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD". And let's take a look here...yep, they're all there. But what are they really planning?
According to the specifications page, nothing's listed as far as features that are to be included (" The UEFI specification is in development"). But currently, since there is no mention as to the true intent of this new technology, and right now the BIOS isn't broken, why reinvent the wheel? Load times are now less than three seconds, which is a tremendous step from BIOS beginnings. New equipment continues to be supported through new BIOS updates. So what do these companies need that the current BIOS can't give them?
Enter DRM. According to Microsoft's Patent on their DRM-supported OS, Microsoft has a few issues with the current BIOS...This AEGIS model requires a tamper-resistant BIOS that has hard-wired into it the signature of the following stage. This scheme has the very considerable advantage that it works well with current microprocessors and the current PC architecture, but has three drawbacks.
1) First, the set of trusted operating systems or trusted publishers must be wired into the BIOS.
2) Second, if the content is valuable enough (for instance, e-cash or Hollywood videos), users will find a way of replacing the BIOS with one that permits an insecure boot.
3) Third, when obtaining data from a network server, the client has no way of proving to the remote server that it is indeed running a trusted system.
So, Microsoft admits that there are flaws that prevent them from using the BIOS in their Trusted Computing platform. But create a new way of booting a computer, protect the technical details from public view, and put the power of the DMCA behind it, and you have a nice foundation into the DRM frontier.