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."

Re:Slashdot

[jdkc4d]

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.

Re:I don't know...

[walshy007]

All of the things you mentioned above are _positive_ things, in that you would have to be crazy to use the bios for anything other than loading the os and getting the hell out.

An interesting read [kerneltrap.org] if anyone cares for it.

All that is being done by making the boot process more complex is letting people add more bugs to firmware, do not want.

Re:UEFI is good.

[Sloppy]

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.