Adam Williamson wrote: > At the user level it's pretty simple: it's a modern replacement for > BIOS. It's an entirely new system firmware standard for PCs. > > The most user-noticeable features of UEFI are probably secure boot > (which has been discussed ad infinitum: the important thing here is not > to confuse UEFI as a whole with the secure boot feature, which is one > small feature of UEFI and can be optional, as it is on all current > implementations. Some don't even have secure boot. The press often makes > this mistake) and the EFI boot manager, which puts the boot manager in > the system firmware where it belongs. No more faffing around with an MBR > bootloader for every disk and possible chainloading of bootloaders in > root partitions. With UEFI, broadly, OSes install somewhere and then > tell the system firmware where they are, and the system firmware gives > you the list of OSes to choose from. > > Many new systems and motherboards have a UEFI-based firmware, now. But > because many OSes don't really support UEFI, UEFI implementations almost > always have a BIOS compatibility mode (sometimes referred to as CSM) and > almost always actually default to using it; you have to do something > specific to boot anything EFI natively. (Laptops with pre-installed OSes > can be an exception to this, there are a few which boot Windows x64 > natively via EFI, I believe). > > I tend to use 'EFI' and 'UEFI' interchangeably (see above!), which is a > bad habit. EFI originated as an Intel thing, at which time it was called > EFI. It then got proposed as an industry standard, accepted, and > somewhat revised, since when it's known as UEFI. Strictly, saying EFI > should really refer to the original Intel implementation only. Very informative! Thanks for taking the time. -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
