Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

7 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. Re:Slashdot by Quantum_Infinity · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  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 AngryDeuce · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It allows you to boot Linux.

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

    2. Re:I don't know... by guruevi · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  4. Re:Slashdot by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. "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/