Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UEFI Formed to Replace BIOS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-i'll-believe-it-when-i-see-code dept.

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."

3 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. More info by asliarun · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read more about EFI here.

  2. Re:Sceptical... by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  3. Best of all this will be Open Sourced by Intel! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.