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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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I'm not so much worried about MSFT requiring OEMs to use the secure boot feature to lock out the owner, but instead I am worried that the oem's will drop UEFI on the hard disk in a hidden partition, instead of storing it on the motherboard in a non-volitaile state. Wiping your hard disk when installing a new OS, or re-imaging a computer could have disastrous effects.
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/
(Dos) BIOS aint done 'till (Lotus) Linux won't run.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So it's the Ourobios?
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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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Secure boot isn't necessarily a dumb idea and would be harmless, if done sensibly. The firmware just needs to present a UI where the owner can manage (add and delete) all the public keys used to check signatures for what the machine's owner authorizes it to run. If you buy a computer and then you are the arbiter of your computer does, then at worst that's an added capability that you don't elect to use, and at best it's useful.
But yeah, I doubt any manufacturers are installing firmware that does it right. If any are, they need to speak up so that people will know their hardware is safe to buy.
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