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Demystifying UEFI, the Overdue BIOS Replacement

Posted by timothy on from the first-how-do-you-pronounce-your-name dept.

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."

8 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slashdot by tepples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not UEFI as bad as much as the possibility that Microsoft will require OEMs to use the secure boot feature of UEFI to lock out the owner of a PC from installing a competing operating system as a condition of shipping the PC with Windows 8.

  2. May I ask... by jawtheshark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What the point was of this article? There is no meat at all in there. I expected a complete deep technical overview of UEFI, not something you can summarize as "It's a little operating system providing services to the actual operating system".

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  3. I don't know... by AngryDeuce · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is wrong with the BIOS anyway? Why does the boot process need to be all flashy? It seems like adding complexity there will just end up causing problems...

    Maybe I'm just a relic...a lot of people don't even know how to get into their BIOS anymore, let alone what the POST and such is afterwards.

    1. Re:I don't know... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What is wrong with the BIOS anyway?

      It allows you to boot Linux.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    2. Re:I don't know... by AngryDeuce · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It allows you to boot Linux.

      The cynical, realistic part of me thinks this is the real answer.

    3. Re:I don't know... by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What is wrong with the BIOS anyway? Why does the boot process need to be all flashy? It seems like adding complexity there will just end up causing problems...

      Maybe I'm just a relic...a lot of people don't even know how to get into their BIOS anymore, let alone what the POST and such is afterwards.

      So... minutes of boot time spent at "press Fwhatever to enter foo" prompts is apealing to you?
      Or on the desktop side, figuring out how BIOS and one or more operating systems enumerate possible boot devices is good enough?

      For a Linux user, all the weird crap you've ever had to do in grub or lilo's configuration will get reduced to something like OS X's bless command, or an intelligent boot menu like refit at least.

      If you guys have no experience with other things like OpenBoot or don't understand BIOS limitations, you are not going to contribute much to this discussion. The article DOES describe what UEFI does and there are systems out there with better-than-BIOS firmware like Sparcs and EFI Macs already, and they have been available for yeeeeeeears. So don't poo on the article or the tech before educating yourselves.

  4. "Re-imagining" by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck everybody who uses that word. It belongs in the marketing buzzword incinerator with "thought-shower", "synergy", "pro-active", and anything "in the cloud".

    --
    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  5. Re:Slashdot by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    (Dos) BIOS aint done 'till (Lotus) Linux won't run.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."