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.

Comments

UEFI has been around for years.

[Anonymous Freak]

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

Re:UEFI has been around for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you don't get to play with it, but then why would you need to?

The only boards that are worth having are the ones that validate my opinion of myself as an ubergeek. My entire self worth springs from my ability to adjust pointless hardware parameters through a poorly designed interface cobbled together by Korean sweatshop developers.

I will never buy a motherboard that doesn't allow me to set the Clock Phase Skew to 0.25, or and the Memory Overdrive Voltage to 1.79. Those are the correct values. If your Apple motherboard doesn't have a byzantine boot menu that allows you to set them, then you're being kept in a walled garden. If you allow Steve Jobs to be an authoritarian control freak who prevents you from setting your memory timing to 4-3-3-2, then why don't you just an iPad and a Wii, and the rest of us will use the real computers.

Now if you excuse me, I need to change the fuel injectors in my car. It's getting near winter, and as the air density increases I need to change the fuel air mixture. It's important that you stay on top of this. Only sheep leave it the same year round.

Diagnostics, system configuration, etc

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Kerma vhureeng

[Nerdfest]

... but how easy is it to recover when it gets bork, bork, borked?

Re:Drivers larger than 2TB!

[TheRaven64]

Clearly you have never used an HP printer.

death to MBR, death to C/H/S

[Snorbert Xangox]

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.

Re:Drivers larger than 2TB!

[Jeremi]

Yes,almost the entire 2GB of the windows kernel is a graphics driver.

That's correct -- Microsoft optimizes their video driver by pre-rendering every possible graphic in advance, and including all of them as resources in the driver binary. That way they can display anything via a single lookup into the displays-table.

What EFI is and isn't

[pchan-]

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.