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EFI = UEFI, and coming to a PC near you soon (tm)

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  • EFI = UEFI, and coming to a PC near you soon (tm)



    Nice little article about the impending move from the 2.5 decade old BIOS to the newer EFI/UEFI pre-boot management system. Intel's EFI 1.1, which the current x86 Macs use, will be replaced by a consortium driven UEFI 2.0 specification due out 1Q 06. By summer time, many of the major PC players plan on starting a slow switch to UEFI in 2006, followed by a flood of UEFI equipment in 2007.

    Some of the new features in UEFI 2.0/.1 looks pretty interesting. There are options to have the OS boot loader built into UEFI, instead of using up partition space on a HDD to do so. Vista will be fully UEFI compatible. UEFI hardware will/should have generic drivers built into them so simply inserting a new device into a system should yield instant basic usage. Network authentication and discovery pre-OS. IPv6 and cryptography are supposed to be added in 2.1. And a few other nifty tricks.

    By the time I buy my next system UEFI will probably be the only option for me

    Jammrock
    “Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out”
    –The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett

  • #2
    I wonder if current boards can be updated to use efu/uefi if the have enough bios flash area?

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    • #3
      Judging by the added functionality, I doubt the current bios flash area is large enough.

      I also wonder if there isn't some hardware change necessary (e.g. to allow network access).


      Jörg
      pixar
      Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

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      • #4
        Originally posted by VJ
        Judging by the added functionality, I doubt the current bios flash area is large enough.

        ...
        Why would you want to expose a PC to a network before the virus scanner loads up?
        Am I missing something here?
        Chuck
        秋音的爸爸

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        • #5
          Originally posted by cjolley
          Why would you want to expose a PC to a network before the virus scanner loads up?
          Am I missing something here?
          Sun has offered this for years in their OpenBoot PROM.

          It for instance allows you to fetch a kernel from a networked computer, perform network installs, ... I'm not sure, but I think it is even possible to access the OpenBoot PROM from a networked computer.

          Even for PCs, it could for instance allow one to store harddisk images on a networked computer, and restore them without having them physically on a disk. Esp. for companies, this could be interesting.

          But I don't know if network access is also part of the UEFI spec.


          Jörg
          pixar
          Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

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          • #6
            I think networking is part of the spec, I have even read that some may include a web browser!

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            • #7
              and I'll bet that in a few years time I'll be cursing UEFI viruses
              If there's artificial intelligence, there's bound to be some artificial stupidity.

              Jeremy Clarkson "806 brake horsepower..and that on that limp wrist faerie liquid the Americans call petrol, if you run it on the more explosive jungle juice we have in Europe you'd be getting 850 brake horsepower..."

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