Swedes Show Intel Sandy Bridge Running BIOS-Successor UEFI 216
An anonymous reader writes "SweClockers.com has gotten it hands on a Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard running Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the long awaited successor of age-old BIOS. Among the differences is a significantly more user-friendly interface, the ability to boot from drives larger than 2 TB and faster boot times. Check it out, on video, in Swedish." Here's an Google's translation of the article.
UEFI has been around for years. (Score:5, Informative)
I have a three year old "Intel Desktop Board" that can boot via UEFI, boot to 2TB+ drives, etc.
It's not exactly new. (And I have a server from 2001
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Not new, but not very common. I suppose that it's mainly the large harddrives that push for this to get out to the mainboards..
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EFI has been in Macs ever since they went Intel. Pretty common.
Of course, you don't get to play with it, but then why would you need to?
Diagnostics, system configuration, etc (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of reasons to want BIOS/UEFI access. The problem with having a totally inaccessible one like Apple does is that if anything goes wrong or you need to change something, well then you are fucked. Apple "just works" until it doesn't and then it can often be more of a problem to fix. I am reminded of a Douglas Adams quote: "The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong is that when something that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
So simple tasks that the BIOS/UEFI/other firmware provides are things like checking the RAM configuration and hardware monitors. In the event there's a problem with the system you can see things at a lower level, like which RAM slots are acknowledging what RAM or if there is a temperature or voltage problem. It can also be used for configuration tasks. Some mundane, like turning off integrated components (sound, net) if they aren't needed, some complex like overclocking.
There's good reasons for access to it. Most people probably never need it, but it is good to have it there for those that do. All the functions are there, might as well have an interface so people can control them if required.
Re:Diagnostics, system configuration, etc (Score:5, Informative)
OS X will tell you all of this stuff in the system profiler. In fact, if you install RAM in a non-optimal configuration in a Mac Pro, it will automatically detect it and tell you how to correct the problem for best performance. In the laptops, there is no "wrong" configuration, unless you put the wrong type of RAM in, in which case that RAM slot is disabled or, in the worst case, the system won't boot (in which case UEFI wouldn't help you anyway).
What happens if the OS does run? (Score:5, Informative)
If you've never encountered a system with OS troubles all that means if you've not diagnosed many systems. We have a host of tools, including info in the BIOS, to diagnose systems that don't boot when checking things like hardware errors. Like in the case of a disk that won't boot. Is the data messed up, or is it a disk failure? If so how bad? Well one thing the BIOS can tell you is if it can see the disk. If it shows no data, or corrupted data, you know it is really bad. On the other hand if it shows up fine, then it is time to move on to bootable diagnostics.
As I said I'm sure for normal users, access is not necessary. That doesn't mean it is never useful. To me it is like saying "Weld the breaker box shut, why would you need to get at that?" Well true, most people don't, I think a great many people never open a breaker box. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have it accessible should it be needed.
Re:What happens if the OS does run? (Score:5, Informative)
You can get some information by booting verbose, by holding down the V key, which causes the computer to boot with a text console. That may give you some information about what's going on.
If the boot process is failing partway, you might be able to boot into single-user mode by holding down the S key, which gives you a root console. From there you can use unix tools to look around and/or fix things.
There are other keys you can use, like the option key to choose between boot devices, or 'n' to boot from a netboot server. Insert the computer's installation DVD, and hold down the 'd' key during boot, and the computer will boot from a diagnostic partition on the disk, which I assume would be useful.
You can also set an EFI password, and lock down these things.
Re:What happens if the OS does run? (Score:5, Informative)
All the mac users here claiming that "youd never need that" probably either havent done much serious troubleshooting, or have a lot of disposable cash (and thus can replace the mac when something goes awry).
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"All the mac users here claiming that "youd never need that" probably either havent done much serious troubleshooting"
My first computers were a ZX81 kit, a Rockwell AIM-65, and a Tektronix 4051 graphics terminal with a storage tube display. Then an Apple IIc which I upgraded with a RAM card and a CPU upgrade. Then a Mac SE/30, a NeXT Cube, a NeXTstation, a few generations of AMD K6 and Athlon PCs which I overclocked and upgraded piecewise, before I grew out of that. Then OS X came out and I started buying M
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"Most of the stuff you mentioned (at least the first half of your post) are reliant on having a functional OS to begin with. If you have a working OS, you wouldnt be tinkering with the BIOS at all (as tools from the OS tend to be more useful anyways)."
Well, not really. The boot option keys are in EFI, so they work even if there's nothing to boot from. The verbose boot log starts really early in the boot process, RAM checks and whatnot. If the *OS* is broken, you'll see messages about it. If the system hangs
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This post took a nosedive with the first sentence, but then made up for it with content not usually seen in a /. post.
-1, Snarky
+5, oh snap
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For that matter, what if the bootable CD runs into an error that it is unable to cope with-- perhaps the hard drive is acting funny, or refusing to read back block X, or whatever...
And if you try to claim that THATS impossible, then im sorry, I agree with GP-- you havent troubleshot many computers.
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Pardon me, what happens if there is a controller error with the CD drive? How exactly would you diagnose this?
USB, FireWire, network DVD sharing, netboot. All of which are available without the need for a BIOS or BIOS-like menu system.
On the other hand, if all those options fail as well (an exceptionally unlikely scenario, but could certainly happen), I don't see how a BIOS/EFI menu system is going to be of much help.
The simple fact is that if you run Mac OS X on Apple hardware, you have no need for access to the EFI system (and I can think of no reasonable scenario where one would even want that, but if you have a
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I'm of the opinion that having EFI access on a Mac would be useful. But there are so many ways to get around a bad HDD on a Mac it's not funny
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I've only owned one Mac in my lifetime, so my knowledge of them may be minimal; but OSX no longer boots. Doesn't seem that rare to me.
Re:What happens if the OS does run? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to get my two cents in, it's also useful when all you have is damaged hardware to start with, Having access to that bios means I can lower certain speeds or increase wait states until things work again. CPU got a little too hot and BSOD's windows? Slow it down until it's stable. Ram going bad? Increase CAS and or RAS Serial Ports bad (Yea who uses them anymore right? ) Disable them, add a card and get the equipment hooked back up.
Mac? I had to support a Mac only environment for the past two years, on to a better job now thank you. When a Mac dies, there's no options. Power supply? $200+. Power supply for a PC ? $50. Mac lovers can worship their shiny white
- Dan.
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It's only the people who work for Apple or Apple shops who think the market is locked-in, because that's all they see.
It just so happens I am shopping for a replacement battery for a several-years-old Macbook. I can get a third pa
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"The reality of the professional working world is the Mac is eye candy, and only useful for performing work the same way a cooper mini is useful for hauling lumber. It's compact and cute, but don't expect to move much in it. "
And by the way, I should point out that while that might have been true 10 years ago, it simply isn't today. Today, the majority of software developers -- the overall majority, that is, including those who develop Windows programs -- do it on a Mac. Look it up. It was professionals who led the switch to Macs. And that means that you are simply wrong. Apples have a lot to offer... if you know what you're doing.
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Mac? I had to support a Mac only environment for the past two years, on to a better job now thank you. When a Mac dies, there's no options. Power supply? $200+. Power supply for a PC ? $50. Mac lovers can worship their shiny white ... equipment... The reality of the professional working world is the Mac is eye candy, and only useful for performing work the same way a cooper mini is useful for hauling lumber. It's compact and cute, but don't expect to move much in it.
You were a PC support employee who found himself out of his element when tasked with supporting Macs. Clearly your preconceived notions cannot be false, so therefore Macs can be nothing other than overpriced toys.
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If a Mac is doing everything your asking a Mac to do, then I can only assume you aren't expecting much.
- Dan.
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Eeek, i think you are mistaken. You can't run Visual Studio natively so you're stuck with bootcamp or VMWare. I think we can agree that there is a lot of development on VS too. There is also the upcoming issue of java depreciation on the mac. That could prevent a lot of developers from coding in OS X unless they use a non-standard jdk. What you probably saw was professionals owning a mac.. people who are making decent money.
Ultimately it doesn't matter what OS/hardware the code is written on, as long a
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Once you strip out the pretentious apple worship, what's left is the same old 'it can't break...' until it does fallacy.
"Pretentious Apple worship"? WTF? The only thing that even remotely matches that is when I called out Yet Another PC user who thinks his PC knowledge applies to Macs. This is no different than a Windows user snobbing about Linux, or yes, Mac users talking about PCs, etc. It wasn't about Macs being superior, but someone talking about something they are ignorant of.
I wasn't being the pretentious one. I was just calling it out, although probably not terribly tactfully.
1. you don't use the bios config screen to troubleshoot. you use it to SET boot options.
I never said you do. In fact, I wrote:
"On
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I believe Mac Pros also have LEDs near the RAM slots that will indicate problems.
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Stop being a doosh.
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There are plenty of reasons to want BIOS/UEFI access. The problem with having a totally inaccessible one like Apple does is that if anything goes wrong or you need to change something, well then you are fucked.
Actually, you take it to the nearest Apple store, and they usually fix for the cost of parts. I've never seen the need to tinker with a PC myself. And yet my jobs usually have me in the guts of a Sun Enterprise or an IBM P series server.
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Thats a hell of a deal, right?
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The problem with having a totally inaccessible one like Apple does is that if anything goes wrong or you need to change something, well then you are fucked.
How is the Mac EFI "inaccessible"? Just put your EFI extensions (for example rEFIt or an EFI shell) on any disk with an EFI partition or a HFS+ volume with the appropriate blessings. The disk can be CD, USB or FireWire.
Of course, it is not often you need to do this, since it's very rare to see a Mac that doesn't boot OS X from any device. In out Mac cluster at work, we can almost always netboot the machine and diagnose from there, when the OS X install DVD won't boot.
Re:UEFI has been around for years. (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, you don't get to play with it, but then why would you need to?
The only boards that are worth having are the ones that validate my opinion of myself as an ubergeek. My entire self worth springs from my ability to adjust pointless hardware parameters through a poorly designed interface cobbled together by Korean sweatshop developers.
I will never buy a motherboard that doesn't allow me to set the Clock Phase Skew to 0.25, or and the Memory Overdrive Voltage to 1.79. Those are the correct values. If your Apple motherboard doesn't have a byzantine boot menu that allows you to set them, then you're being kept in a walled garden. If you allow Steve Jobs to be an authoritarian control freak who prevents you from setting your memory timing to 4-3-3-2, then why don't you just an iPad and a Wii, and the rest of us will use the real computers.
Now if you excuse me, I need to change the fuel injectors in my car. It's getting near winter, and as the air density increases I need to change the fuel air mixture. It's important that you stay on top of this. Only sheep leave it the same year round.
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I believe you but i have a hard time believing you went from building your computers to using pre-built.. Dells. AHHHHHHHH!
Also, there are closed water cooling systems these days.. zero maint required. But it sounds like you found what you like and you have a job that can support it : )
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Now if you excuse me, I need to change the fuel injectors in my car. It's getting near winter, and as the air density increases I need to change the fuel air mixture. It's important that you stay on top of this. Only sheep leave it the same year round.
Right-on brother !
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No. No. The GP is quite right. The same person that wants to tweak their BIOS because they think it's best is the same kinda person that would think changing the fuel injectors would be the Right Thing To Do.
Your Sarcasm meter is off. I suggest you swap it out for a wide-band one. Perhaps in metric.
Re:UEFI has been around for years. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really.
While I wouldn't change the fuel injectors based on a seasonal change, I have changed them based around performance limitation of stock setups.
I have also changed out the breathing system to take advantage of less restrictive airflow. I have added performance spark plugs and ignition systems in some cases too.
The point is that it's not uncommon to modify the mechanics of a car to obtain some objective. Increased fuel injector size allows quicker/more responsive, and in some cases, more delivery of fuel. Of course you probably wouldn't see much of an improvement if you didn't alter other things too.
Perhaps the person who changes bios settings to tweak them out is the same type of person who would soup up a car to get the most performance possible from them.
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Lol.. Where did you get your numbers from? I mean there are entire industries devoted to little more then performance tuning and souping up cars. Ever heard of Nascar or any of the other related racing sports? I mean hell, there are even blowers, turbos, and quite a few other line of products just for boats let along motorcycles, quads and so on.
Do you really think Jegs or Summit, elderbrock, Heddman, Holly, bully dog, Protune, or the multitude of TV shows like Horsepower, Trucks, offroad, and so on would e
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We use EFI to boot a Linux image loaded into EFI flash. So it takes less than a second to start the kernel (around 500 milliseconds - we haven't timed it precisely).
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um no. Last I checked, Macs weren't really that common in the market. So no,it's not common.
Macs run OSX, so I suppose thats common amongst all computers as well?
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Hint: Apple is now a bigger company than Microsoft, and unlike Microsoft they didn't get there by selling their OS. Which, by the way, costs $29.
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Just checked now; it's 5-7% depending on who you ask. Maybe as high as ~10% if you restrict yourself US, which the GP didn't and I wouldn't tend to do either (not being American).
Saying it costs $29 is kind of missing the point, because you can't legally install it for that $29 package without also paying Apple for a computer. It's effectively an update price for an OS you're supposed to already own the previous version of from a bundle purchase. If they drop that restriction and allow install on arbitra
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UEFI is extremely common. Modern laptop makers use it as a way to have a modern BIOS (e.g. InsydeH2O) instead of the horrible cesspool of 16-bit code that are traditional BIOSes. At least Acer and Sony seem to be using this kind of setup for all of their recent laptops for a few years now, and I'm pretty sure quite a few other manufacturers are doing the same.
Unfortunately, most of the time the EFI features are completely inaccessible to the user and OS. They just add in the usual BIOS emulation layer, the
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At least Acer and Sony seem to be using this kind of setup for all of their recent laptops for a few years now, and I'm pretty sure quite a few other manufacturers are doing the same.
That's all I needed to hear...
Sony:
The same people who have no qualms about adding a rootkit to your windows-based PC if you have the audacity to put an audio CD in your drive.
The same people that make the VAIO, which is one of the most ridiculous machines to have to work on if any of the hardware fails (and it does, repeatedly and often).
The same people who sold a product, then removed half the features in the name of anti-piracy... causing the pirates to start hacking the DRM on their games, instead of pl
Historical Preenactment Society (Score:2)
"Because the best history has yet to happen" [topatoco.com]
Or maybe not. It's not all jetpacks and laser beams for breakfast right now, for that matter.
Cheers,
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Re:UEFI has been around for years. (Score:4, Insightful)
NIH?
Re:UEFI has been around for years. (Score:5, Insightful)
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mmmmmmm fourth!!!
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mmmmmmm fourth!!!
fourth != Forth
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OpenBIOS is used for some OpenFirmware platforms in QEmu mostly.
It's partially obsoleted by three separate OpenFirmware implementations released under BSD-like licensing later-on, which had real world exposure (unlike OpenBIOS, which we wrote from scratch according to the specification).
On real (x86) hardware coreboot (www.coreboot.org) is a better match.
It supports everything from special designs to "standard" systems: Linux, some custom loader, a pcbios implementation, or UEFI (or even OpenBIOS, if you so
Re:UEFI has been around for years. (Score:4, Informative)
Every Intel brand motherboard since 2007 has had EFI. From what I can tell, this motherboard is an Intel brand, too.
What EFI is and isn't (Score:5, Informative)
Every time Slashdot has a story of EFI, we get a thousand uninformed posts about what it is, isn't, what it should do and why it sucks. As someone who has worked on EFI for years, let me clear them up for you:
1) EFI was designed by Intel as a replacement for BIOS. UEFI (edk2) is the second generation EFI, and is open source (see: http://tianocore.sourceforge.net [slashdot.org]). Intel delivers all of their boot support code as EFI drivers these days.
2) EFI is NOT a graphical interface. Some Chinese motherboard makers created terrible graphical configuration applications for it. Apple created a pretty nice boot selector. It can just as easily "post" and give you a console-mode menu like you're used to.
3) EFI is very common. All Apple computers use it. Most PC (Windows / Linux) laptops use it (your laptop probably does if it was made in the last 4 years). EFI drops into BIOS emulation mode after boot because Windows doesn't support it.
4) EFI machines generally allocate a small EFI partition on the hard drive, particularly if they use GPT. All Intel-based machines boot from flash memory and would successfully boot without this partition. This partition is for additional EFI firmware volumes or drivers that can be dynamically loaded.
5) EFI is much better than BIOS. It runs in full 32/64 bit mode. It can dynamically load drivers built into the ROM of your hardware (like a video card) and therefore doesn't have to rely on ancient backward-compatibility modes. It can run "apps", like a safe firmware updater so you don't have to boot your PC with a DOS boot disk to update the firmware. It can communicate a lot of configuration information to the OS and even provide hooks for some low level hardware-specific drivers. It can do things like boot from a network-shared CD-ROM drive or from a disk image stored on a USB stick (without resorting to making bootable partitions and jumping through a bunch of hoops like your average Linux USB stick). EFI can read FAT, NTFS, EXT2, HFS+ filesystems and boot the kernel directly from there (and the initrd image) without involving grub or other second stage boot loader. It can boot your GPT-tagged disks in your chosen order no matter what order you changed them around (take your boot drive, move it to a USB enclosure, boot from it).
Booting Intel machines is really fucking complicated, and EFI makes it much simpler.
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Intel delivers all of their boot support code as EFI drivers these days.
But not as open source. Tiano is a huge bunch of code, but the really interesting bits aren't in there.
EFI is much better than BIOS. It runs in full 32/64 bit mode.
coreboot welcomes you to 1999. Besides that: why is it that EFI exists in "either 32 or 64bit", instead of cleanly supporting both? The additional complexity of thunking libraries can't be it, as tiano already provides a runtime loader to resolve in-flash libraries...
Booting Intel machines is really fucking complicated, and EFI makes it much simpler.
Sorry, but EFI is fucking complicated, too. runtime linker - I rest my case.
It's just that you don't have to care about this complexity when
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I have a three year old "Intel Desktop Board" that can boot via UEFI, boot to 2TB+ drives, etc.
It's not exactly new. (And I have a server from 2001
It was common on Intel's high-end server boards, then it came to their entry level boards a few years ago. Now it is making it into the mainstream desktop boards. However, what Intel had on their server boards was quite slow to boot.
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The site video requires Flash, so I skipped the video.
The pretty EFI screen makes it look like they're actually expecting the buyers of the board to be using EFI. With the exception of Intel Apple machines, few users actually used the EFI capability on boards that had it.
Although the EFI screen looks nice, those thermometer-like displays for voltage don't really make much sense. It's not like showing a small indication for CPU voltage tells the user anything useful.
If they'd wanted to do that, showing the
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I've seen a lot of articles about how new and cool UEFI is going to be recently, they must be pushing some publicity to the media who are presumably publishing it on the grounds it sounds clever.
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and about the user interface..
our 386dx had a bios interface that mimicked windows, mouse support and all. the 'windows' were hardcoded menus mostly, but still it did the visual trick.
Drivers larger than 2TB! (Score:4, Funny)
That's pretty big for a driver. It would take me months to write something that big.
Re:Drivers larger than 2TB! (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes,almost the entire 2GB of the windows kernel is a graphics driver. It's been included in windows kernels for quite a while now. Of course, most people replace that quickly, with something from nVidia or ATI.
Re:Drivers larger than 2TB! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes,almost the entire 2GB of the windows kernel is a graphics driver.
That's correct -- Microsoft optimizes their video driver by pre-rendering every possible graphic in advance, and including all of them as resources in the driver binary. That way they can display anything via a single lookup into the displays-table.
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Re:Drivers larger than 2TB! (Score:5, Funny)
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We don't call them printers, they are Ink sale Enablement Devices, or IEDs.
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Drivers? (Score:3, Funny)
> boot from drivers larger than 2 TB
Just what we need, more and bigger drivers!
Drivers? What about the 9-irons? (Score:4, Funny)
And just how far can someone hit a ball with a 2TB driver? Are they PGA-approved, or will the club kick me out if they find me using one? Hmm...
Cheers,
drivers larger than 2 TB (Score:3, Funny)
When will the code bloat stop? What are they doing, including a look-up table for every memory address?
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I think you need to re-read the title of his post. I'll even highlight the relevant part for you:
drivers larger than 2 TB
Make sure to read that emphasized words a few times for the joke to finally sink in.
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Shoot, our art department resource server has 3TB and we're constantly bumping up against that limit. Our art department is one guy and I help sometimes. And we're a tiny catalog shop that puts out two catalogs a year. We just never delete anything. I can imagine a serious publishing company chews through that in a day and orders 2TB drives by the case.
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2TB drivers (Score:2)
..the ability to boot from drivers larger than 2 TB and faster boot times.
That's some work to be able to load a +2TB driver and still have faster boot times. No how much RAM did I need for this?
Kerma vhureeng (Score:5, Funny)
Uneeffied Ixtenseeble-a Furmvere-a Interffece-a nemed heur tu tudey's beseec inpoot ooootpoot system thet elloos intrunce-a in iernest veet zee loonch ooff Intel Sundy Breedge-a et zee ind. Bork bork bork! UEFI kun leeknes feed itt nedbuntet oopereteefsystem sum öferkummer många ef de-a begränsneenger sum feenns i det uråldreega BIOS. UEFI is leeke-a a sceled-doon oopereteeng system vheech oofercumes muny ooff zee leemiteshuns ooff zee ege-a-oold BIOS.
Noo in UEFI
* Ebeelity tu mudern grepheecel interffece-a
* Uppstert från legreengsenheter större-a än 2 TB Buut frum sturege-a defeeces lerger thun 2 TB
* Snebbere-a uppstertsteeder Fester buut teemes
* Flexeebel uppstert från oobegränsed mängd källur Flexeeble-a buut frum un unleemited fereeety ooff suoorces
* CPOo-ooberuende-a erkeetektoor CPOo ercheetectoore-a independent
* Foollt utbyggd prugremmeeljö Foolly fledged sufftvere-a infurunment
* Stöd för dreefrootiner Sooppurt fur dreefers
* Stöd för 32/64-beeters meennesedressering Sooppurt fur 32/64 beet memury eddresseeng
* Efuncered säkerhet inklooseefe-a kryptereeng Edfunced secooreety incloodeeng incrypshun
Re:Kerma vhureeng (Score:5, Funny)
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I would like to take this opportunity to point out that once, I believe in season 2 of The Muppet Show, it was revealed that the Swedish Chef was only faking speaking Mock Swedish., and that his primary language was actually Mock Japanese.
And know you know, the rest of the story.
Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
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And it really does load 2TB drivers.
Eufi is not a BIOS, (Score:4, Informative)
It's just a Swedish cooking term.
"Eufi deufi, peurfi dur." means "Add meatballs and simmer for 20 minutes."
Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_Yf4zz-yo [youtube.com]
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Actually, "Add meatballs and simmer for 20 minutes" would translate to something like "Lägg i köttbullar och låt sjuda i 20 minuter.".
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In Sweden that say 20 and not something like 'twenty'? odd
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No need to explain the dish, just point out that you can find any nearby IKEA using Google maps :)
death to MBR, death to C/H/S (Score:5, Informative)
More than a decade after hard drives stopped internally using a fixed cylinder/head/sector geometry, we finally get mass market deployment of a partitioning scheme that completely gets rid of this big, dumb lie.
All the hoo-haa over new drives with 4kB sectors and the way that DOS-compatible operating systems partitioning tools want you to lay out your disk has actually already been experienced by sysadmins for years, when they attempt to come up with partitioning schemes for those operating systems that align filesystem blocks with the underlying geometry of SSD write blocks or RAID 5 stripe segments.
Next time you buy an SD card or thumb drive, stick it into a box with a decent formatting tool and look at the actual start sector for the partitions. You will find that the manufacturers have quietly been using sane partition start sector values (i.e., power of two, not "first sector of second track of cylinder 0") because they know that the performance of the device would be horrible if almost every VFAT cluster write spanned multiple flash write blocks.
And all this stuffing around has been forced upon us because Microsoft never had the balls to say, "you want to rock out with Borland Sidekick or Netware 3.0? Sure, use a frickin' VM, or use a new version of DOS that speaks native LBA to the BIOS. Those are your choices."
All the brainpower and effort that has been wasted on workarounds for the effects of the brain damaged MBR partitioning table could have been much better used actually improving how computers worked, rather than treading water.
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Linux fdisk or GNU parted - change the units to sectors and you can then print the partition table out in raw sector LBA offsets.
There's another gotcha for FAT filesystems on SDHC, in that the filesystem metadata at the start of the partition has no natural power-of-two alignment. If you look into the FAT filesystem that a digital camera puts on an SD card when you format it, I suspect that you'll see a bunch of reserved sectors as padding before the FATs, to ensure that the first data sector lines up nicel
BIOS successor? I think not. (Score:2)
Re:BIOS successor? I think not. (Score:4, Insightful)
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What are some of the benefits that we could see with it? Well:
-Bare metal hypervisors. Imagine being able to boot up linux and windows side-by-side and not have to worry about setting up any sort of virtual machine. You could switch between the two using a keyboard combo. Or even being able to setup a COW copy of windows so cleaning up your mom's copy of windows is as easy as hitting a few keys and setting it back to a known clean state...
Oh, like ESXi [vmware.com]? No, wait, you said no virtual machine... wait, what? Hypervisor = Virtual machine control system [yourdictionary.com].
Your "insta-clean" windows can be accomplished with drive imaging [techsupportalert.com], or "freezing" [wikipedia.org].
-Improved device support. Devices could use a standardised interface on the "bios" level so that windows/linux/osx would just need a simple driver layer to talk to the device. Device manufacturers could provide what basically amounts to a shim to load into the UEFI which provides the mapping between the actual device and the standardised hardware interface. Of course this may run into issues such as non-standard or extended features but this could be taken care of with extensible interfaces.
Are you advocating an OS-independent version of DirectX [viaarena.com] for bare metal? Or are you describing how BIOS already operates [rlrouse.com]?
In short, either you have no idea what you're talking about, or you're simply unaware that what you're describing is already in existence (and, indeed, is the way it already works).
Translated transcript (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest difference between UEFI and BIOS is that UEFI gives motherboard manufacturers much better possibilities of implementing their own software. Our test motherboard comes from Asus, and the Taiwanese manufacturer has put in several exciting new features. To begin with you can use your mouse, which wasn't possible in BIOS, and there's also the possibility of running in several different modes. For example, there's this simplified mode that greets you when you enter UEFI. Here you can choose between power saving, normal setting or some kind of optimal setting. All settings are then adjusted automatically and you don't have to worry about it. Then there's this simple drag-and-drop system to choose boot order and some panels are available that show fan speeds and the like. Very simple and absolutely enough for anyone without any desire to dig into it.
There's also a more advanced mode available through the menu here, and now it looks more familiar compared to BIOS. It works more or less the same way except the graphics are updated and there are more options. There are several menus available where you can change language, security settings, and there's this "AI Tweaker" where you can overclock the processor, just as you're used to from BIOS. The usual advanced settings for integrated components such as the processor etc. are there, and they work just as usual. The monitor settings where you can see temperature, fan speeds, set fan profiles and so on, also work just as in BIOS except it looks better and you can use your mouse which makes it easier to navigate. The boot settings contain some new features, for example you can just click one of the alternatives and the computer boots from that device, you don't have to enter a special menu or anything. Finally in the last menu, there are some tools, Asus' flash tool to update the BIOS, which itself is also updated with new features. You can easily use your mouse to pick a BIOS version from hard disks or USB storage that you want to use on your motherboard.
Well, that's just a quick look on an implementation of UEFI for the next generation Intel platform. With the possibilities offered by this new system we will likely see new interesting solutions in the near future. We at Sweclockers will of course cover this development and report as much as we can until the final release.
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That is not a plus.
One thing that's on my wishlist (Score:2)
One thing that disappoints me about current UEFI motherboards is that you still need to have certain files at certain locations on your primary hard disk. Specifically my new EFI based system required me to partition my hard drive so that there is an EFI System partition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_System_partition [wikipedia.org]
This EFI System partition is a variant of the FAT file system that contains the EFI bootloader. When i heard of EFI i assumed there'd be a bit of flash on the motherboard to store the EFI bo
UEFI ? (Score:2)
Is it going to need the sacrifice of a megabyte of my harddisk - just like EFI ? Or will it be content to live in its own solid state somewhere. Didn't RTFA by the way, it probably shows.
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Not as a boot drive.
Then again not likely anyone "needs" a >2TB boot drive. Still most computers sold only have a single drive and eventually dell, hp, and the like will want to sell 2.1TB drives. Booting from >2TB drive requires UEFI.
Re: (Score:2)
Not as a boot drive.
Then again not likely anyone "needs" a >2TB boot drive. Still most computers sold only have a single drive and eventually dell, hp, and the like will want to sell 2.1TB drives. Booting from >2TB drive requires UEFI.
Actually, your boot drive should be as small as you can get it, for performance reasons.
Best (home-brew) scenario is several small drives in multiple RAID1 configuration... boot from a pair, use programs from another pair, and use anything else for storage. Gigabit Ethernet makes anything on your network as quick as if it came from a drive in the local machine unless you're running an array of Raptors for storage.
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Yes, your latency will be higher, but not noticeably so for most applications. I will also point out that I was talking about home-based storage solutions, not enterprise. For home-use applications, are you seriously going to tell me you'll notice the difference between 0.2ms (average ping to local network) and 0.01ms (average latency of an SSD) when you want to stream a movie? Many of us couldn't tell the difference between 100ms and 120ms (twitch gamers aside), let alone a couple orders of magnitude small
Re: (Score:2)
Youre OS reports the size incorrectly — you still have 2.1 TB, your OS is lying and should say 1.91 TiB, not 1.91 TB.
There are no lies from the drive manufacturers.
I think all but Windows now have the calculations correctly shown. Apple have moved to 1000b to 1kB etc, and many Linux distributions measure as kiB.
Re: (Score:2)
'tera' is the SI prefix for 1,000^4 (or 1,000,000,000,000). So, 'terabyte' does literally mean 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix [wikipedia.org]
1,099,511,627,776 = 1,024^4 That would be 1 tebibyte(TiB) using the prefixes for powers of 1024 that have been standardized and supported by many international standardization bodies.
The reason people still use SI prefixes when referring to powers of 1024 is because that is what they have been using for a long time prior to the standardization of bina
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I saw Swedes running across a sandy bridge that their spies ("Intel") had just discovered and "UEFI" being some sort of Ultimate Fighting thingamaroo
Fear not. The agreement with Wikileaks halts any disclosure about Sweden.