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

[Jammrock]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1917410,00.asp

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

[Marshmallowman]

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

[VJ]

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

[cjolley]

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?

[VJ]

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

[Marshmallowman]

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

[Technoid]

and I'll bet that in a few years time I'll be cursing UEFI viruses