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Swedes Show Intel Sandy Bridge Running BIOS-Successor UEFI
An anonymous reader writes "SweClockers.com has gotten it hands on a Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard running Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the long awaited successor of age-old BIOS. Among the differences is a significantly more user-friendly interface, the ability to boot from drives larger than 2 TB and faster boot times. Check it out, on video, in Swedish." Here's an Google's translation of the article.
I have a three year old "Intel Desktop Board" that can boot via UEFI, boot to 2TB+ drives, etc.
It's not exactly new. (And I have a server from 2001
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
That's pretty big for a driver. It would take me months to write something that big.
> boot from drivers larger than 2 TB
Just what we need, more and bigger drivers!
When will the code bloat stop? What are they doing, including a look-up table for every memory address?
Uneeffied Ixtenseeble-a Furmvere-a Interffece-a nemed heur tu tudey's beseec inpoot ooootpoot system thet elloos intrunce-a in iernest veet zee loonch ooff Intel Sundy Breedge-a et zee ind. Bork bork bork! UEFI kun leeknes feed itt nedbuntet oopereteefsystem sum öferkummer många ef de-a begränsneenger sum feenns i det uråldreega BIOS. UEFI is leeke-a a sceled-doon oopereteeng system vheech oofercumes muny ooff zee leemiteshuns ooff zee ege-a-oold BIOS.
Noo in UEFI
* Ebeelity tu mudern grepheecel interffece-a
* Uppstert från legreengsenheter större-a än 2 TB Buut frum sturege-a defeeces lerger thun 2 TB
* Snebbere-a uppstertsteeder Fester buut teemes
* Flexeebel uppstert från oobegränsed mängd källur Flexeeble-a buut frum un unleemited fereeety ooff suoorces
* CPOo-ooberuende-a erkeetektoor CPOo ercheetectoore-a independent
* Foollt utbyggd prugremmeeljö Foolly fledged sufftvere-a infurunment
* Stöd för dreefrootiner Sooppurt fur dreefers
* Stöd för 32/64-beeters meennesedressering Sooppurt fur 32/64 beet memury eddresseeng
* Efuncered säkerhet inklooseefe-a kryptereeng Edfunced secooreety incloodeeng incrypshun
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I heard Microsoft is already working on a competitor to UEFI. It's called UFIA. ;-)
There are plenty of reasons to want BIOS/UEFI access. The problem with having a totally inaccessible one like Apple does is that if anything goes wrong or you need to change something, well then you are fucked. Apple "just works" until it doesn't and then it can often be more of a problem to fix. I am reminded of a Douglas Adams quote: "The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong is that when something that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
So simple tasks that the BIOS/UEFI/other firmware provides are things like checking the RAM configuration and hardware monitors. In the event there's a problem with the system you can see things at a lower level, like which RAM slots are acknowledging what RAM or if there is a temperature or voltage problem. It can also be used for configuration tasks. Some mundane, like turning off integrated components (sound, net) if they aren't needed, some complex like overclocking.
There's good reasons for access to it. Most people probably never need it, but it is good to have it there for those that do. All the functions are there, might as well have an interface so people can control them if required.
It's just a Swedish cooking term.
"Eufi deufi, peurfi dur." means "Add meatballs and simmer for 20 minutes."
Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_Yf4zz-yo
If you've never encountered a system with OS troubles all that means if you've not diagnosed many systems. We have a host of tools, including info in the BIOS, to diagnose systems that don't boot when checking things like hardware errors. Like in the case of a disk that won't boot. Is the data messed up, or is it a disk failure? If so how bad? Well one thing the BIOS can tell you is if it can see the disk. If it shows no data, or corrupted data, you know it is really bad. On the other hand if it shows up fine, then it is time to move on to bootable diagnostics.
As I said I'm sure for normal users, access is not necessary. That doesn't mean it is never useful. To me it is like saying "Weld the breaker box shut, why would you need to get at that?" Well true, most people don't, I think a great many people never open a breaker box. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have it accessible should it be needed.
More than a decade after hard drives stopped internally using a fixed cylinder/head/sector geometry, we finally get mass market deployment of a partitioning scheme that completely gets rid of this big, dumb lie.
All the hoo-haa over new drives with 4kB sectors and the way that DOS-compatible operating systems partitioning tools want you to lay out your disk has actually already been experienced by sysadmins for years, when they attempt to come up with partitioning schemes for those operating systems that align filesystem blocks with the underlying geometry of SSD write blocks or RAID 5 stripe segments.
Next time you buy an SD card or thumb drive, stick it into a box with a decent formatting tool and look at the actual start sector for the partitions. You will find that the manufacturers have quietly been using sane partition start sector values (i.e., power of two, not "first sector of second track of cylinder 0") because they know that the performance of the device would be horrible if almost every VFAT cluster write spanned multiple flash write blocks.
And all this stuffing around has been forced upon us because Microsoft never had the balls to say, "you want to rock out with Borland Sidekick or Netware 3.0? Sure, use a frickin' VM, or use a new version of DOS that speaks native LBA to the BIOS. Those are your choices."
All the brainpower and effort that has been wasted on workarounds for the effects of the brain damaged MBR partitioning table could have been much better used actually improving how computers worked, rather than treading water.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
And just how far can someone hit a ball with a 2TB driver? Are they PGA-approved, or will the club kick me out if they find me using one? Hmm...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Hello and welcome to Sweclockers! Today we're looking at UEFI, the boot software that is the successor of the old but still very popular BIOS. UEFI has become a hot topic recently as it's going to be used extensively in the next generation of Intel processors, codenamed Sandy Bridge. So let us have a look at what it has to offer.
The biggest difference between UEFI and BIOS is that UEFI gives motherboard manufacturers much better possibilities of implementing their own software. Our test motherboard comes from Asus, and the Taiwanese manufacturer has put in several exciting new features. To begin with you can use your mouse, which wasn't possible in BIOS, and there's also the possibility of running in several different modes. For example, there's this simplified mode that greets you when you enter UEFI. Here you can choose between power saving, normal setting or some kind of optimal setting. All settings are then adjusted automatically and you don't have to worry about it. Then there's this simple drag-and-drop system to choose boot order and some panels are available that show fan speeds and the like. Very simple and absolutely enough for anyone without any desire to dig into it.
There's also a more advanced mode available through the menu here, and now it looks more familiar compared to BIOS. It works more or less the same way except the graphics are updated and there are more options. There are several menus available where you can change language, security settings, and there's this "AI Tweaker" where you can overclock the processor, just as you're used to from BIOS. The usual advanced settings for integrated components such as the processor etc. are there, and they work just as usual. The monitor settings where you can see temperature, fan speeds, set fan profiles and so on, also work just as in BIOS except it looks better and you can use your mouse which makes it easier to navigate. The boot settings contain some new features, for example you can just click one of the alternatives and the computer boots from that device, you don't have to enter a special menu or anything. Finally in the last menu, there are some tools, Asus' flash tool to update the BIOS, which itself is also updated with new features. You can easily use your mouse to pick a BIOS version from hard disks or USB storage that you want to use on your motherboard.
Well, that's just a quick look on an implementation of UEFI for the next generation Intel platform. With the possibilities offered by this new system we will likely see new interesting solutions in the near future. We at Sweclockers will of course cover this development and report as much as we can until the final release.
Its less about appearance and more about adaptability. UEFI software is not as strict about which motherboard it runs on - and you can implement significantly more functionality into it, helped by the fact that its much easier to code for (C++ rather than Assembly). The fact that its capable of handling more than 64kilobytes of RAM helps for this as well. Its not based on code thats older than quite a number of posters here. Dozens and dozens of difficult (thus costly) modifications have had to be made to BIOS in order for it not to break modern systems. I remember when more than 128gb was unusable on a lot of machines because of BIOS; and frequently forced a complete motherboard replacement because BIOS just could not be reliably updated on a broad scale. The fact that its adaptability also permits greater ease of use is merely a bonus; its not its purpose. And it boots faster too. BIOS has been horribly mutilated and twisted into something it was never meant to do. It should've been replaced years ago.
Every time Slashdot has a story of EFI, we get a thousand uninformed posts about what it is, isn't, what it should do and why it sucks. As someone who has worked on EFI for years, let me clear them up for you:
1) EFI was designed by Intel as a replacement for BIOS. UEFI (edk2) is the second generation EFI, and is open source (see: http://tianocore.sourceforge.net). Intel delivers all of their boot support code as EFI drivers these days.
2) EFI is NOT a graphical interface. Some Chinese motherboard makers created terrible graphical configuration applications for it. Apple created a pretty nice boot selector. It can just as easily "post" and give you a console-mode menu like you're used to.
3) EFI is very common. All Apple computers use it. Most PC (Windows / Linux) laptops use it (your laptop probably does if it was made in the last 4 years). EFI drops into BIOS emulation mode after boot because Windows doesn't support it.
4) EFI machines generally allocate a small EFI partition on the hard drive, particularly if they use GPT. All Intel-based machines boot from flash memory and would successfully boot without this partition. This partition is for additional EFI firmware volumes or drivers that can be dynamically loaded.
5) EFI is much better than BIOS. It runs in full 32/64 bit mode. It can dynamically load drivers built into the ROM of your hardware (like a video card) and therefore doesn't have to rely on ancient backward-compatibility modes. It can run "apps", like a safe firmware updater so you don't have to boot your PC with a DOS boot disk to update the firmware. It can communicate a lot of configuration information to the OS and even provide hooks for some low level hardware-specific drivers. It can do things like boot from a network-shared CD-ROM drive or from a disk image stored on a USB stick (without resorting to making bootable partitions and jumping through a bunch of hoops like your average Linux USB stick). EFI can read FAT, NTFS, EXT2, HFS+ filesystems and boot the kernel directly from there (and the initrd image) without involving grub or other second stage boot loader. It can boot your GPT-tagged disks in your chosen order no matter what order you changed them around (take your boot drive, move it to a USB enclosure, boot from it).
Booting Intel machines is really fucking complicated, and EFI makes it much simpler.