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Demystifying UEFI, the Overdue BIOS Replacement
An anonymous reader writes "After more than 30 years of unerring and yet surprising supremacy, BIOS is taking its final bows. Taking its place is UEFI, a specification that begun its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS's antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel's Itanium processors. UEFI, as the article explains, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces."
There's nothing wrong with Slashdot "articles" contradicting themselves, because they are not articles written by Slashdot staff. They are stories submitted by users and there's nothing wrong in contradiction arising out of two stories (which are basically opinions based on some facts) submitted by two different people.
You seem to be missing the difference between UEFI and UEFI systems defaulting to only running signed boot loaders (possibly without a way for the end user to change the setting, though if I had to guess that won't be happening in anything but some tablets from companies like say Sony). As to EUFI being a complete re-imagining, not really. It's more of a proprietary implementation of the ideas from Sun's OpenBoot.
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It seems that EFI may not be the brilliant thing that it is supposed to be. Somebody doing a lot of work involving it blogs here - http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ - and there are lots of depressing things to read there. To quote from the page:
> It's an awful thing and I've lost far too much of my life to it. It complicates the process of booting for no real benefit to the OS. The only real advantage we've seen so far is that we can configure boot devices in a vaguely vendor-neutral manner without having to care about BIOS drive numbers. Woo.
BIOS has a LOT of limitations. >2TB hard drives, network boot, disk controllers, GPU's, IPMI, ... everything has to subvert the BIOS in some way which makes it mightily slow. My iMac boots with Lion in 7 seconds. My Linux machine takes 15 seconds just getting to Grub, my servers take up to 45 seconds to get to the boot loader.
BIOS is ALWAYS hooked into 8086 mode (real mode) so at boot time you are limited by it's calls (such as 13h for disks) and that's hard and expensive to emulate on a non-x86 system (such as most Intel/AMD processors).
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OSX uses GPT partition maps on x86 machines, they only had their own partition map on PPC systems. Current OSX running on x86 macs can still read disks which use the PPC partition map (as can linux), but can't boot from them.
Linux has supported EFI for a long time, and Intel have been pushing EFI for a long time.... We would have had EFI many years ago, only MS never bothered to support it until very recently.
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