Talk:UEFI

I have significantly reworked the article to address most of the comments on this page. I've added several references to the article. The most significant one is to an Intel presentation describing why EFI is better than the traditional PC BIOS, and how it is designed as a replacement for it. I've worded the article to reflect how EFI was described in the presentation, and I've attributed this thinking to Intel.

I think it's pretty neutral. I certainly don't have a TC (or licensing or patent or...) axe to grind. If others agree, then maybe we can remove the NPOV tag...

I've also left the information regarding FAT issues on the talk page below. These are certainly an issue for providers of EFI systems and Open Suorce operating systems, but I don't think that an article describing EFI needs to get bogged down in a patent discussion: it's certainly not an issue particularly specific to EFI as compared to any other computer technology. You wouldn't include a huge patent debate in a digital camera article, even though they use FAT, too...

Tmassey 20:06, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

FAT

According to this presentation from WinHec 2004 (page 15), the EFI System Partition (ESP) is FAT-32: EFI And Windows "Longhorn"

And Microsoft just won the case about the FAT patents: Microsoft's file system patent upheld

So to use FAT you need to license the IP from Microsoft: Microsoft FAT license (Broken link?)

But you can do that for free if you are implementing EFI, here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx

The standard dosn't say anything about other partitions than the ESP, so that doesn't rule out MacOS.

Apple and EFI

"In 2006, Apple shipped their first Intel-based Macintosh computers with EFI, replacing Open Firmware on their iMac and MacBook Pro models."

This is unclear as to whether it implies that Apple shipped their first computer with EFI or not. (I'm not sure of this myself, but I'm pretty sure this is the case.) Rewording it might be better: "In 2006, Apple shipped their first Macintosh computers with EFI, replacing Open Firmware on their new Intel-based iMac and MacBook Pro models." That seems a bit clearer to me. Paul^C/_T+ 19:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree: this was not clear. The new IntelMac's are EFI based. However, there have never been OpenFirmware Intel Mac's: the developer computers were BIOS-based, not OF. I've changed the text to read: "In 2006, Apple Computer shipped their first Intel-based Macintosh computers with EFI instead of OpenFirmware, which had been used on their previous PowerPC-based systems.[3]" Thoughts?

Tmassey 20:42, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

cleanup tag

This article wouldn't need its cleanup tag anymore if there were some headers. --Michiel Sikma 20:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

EFI prediction

"Ideally, the EFI development model will move the concept of hardware drivers from the operating system back into the lowest level of the PC structure: the hardware itself."

Does anyone else have a problem with this sentence? I edited the article to include sections and made some minor grammatical changes. I wanted to change this sentence, but I let it stand.

The problem that I see is that it makes it sound like the author is proposing that OS-level drivers are bad and EFI-level drivers are good. That debate is probably beyond the scope of this article. If the sentence stays, it should probably be worded to sound less like an opinion.

Agree with above. Also I found it a little confusing, since the article makes clear that EFI seems to make it easier to update the 'bios' level then before.. And then comments about it being in the hardware. Some clarification would be great. 70.113.217.91

Recent edits

I noticed this page was being cleaned up at the same time I was attempting to do the same thing. I went with my version as I feel it is cleaner, more organized, and represents more signficant content changes than the other version. I wish I could have it done sooner, so as to save the other person some work. If there are any significant and important changes in the other version that should be incorporated, please do so (I'm not that great at reading the diff pages—they're not very helpful sometimes)—Kbolino 22:12, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What EFI really is

EFI is actually quite a few things. First of all is it not completely a bios replacement. It provides no means for performing the POST or setup. However it does act like a replacement bios in the sense of providing a low level continiously available system for interfacing with the hardware.

It is interesting that Intel's sample implementation has one form in which it uses to bios to implement its features. There is a second form that can be loaded by the bios'es initial program loader, that once loaded ignores the bios completely. (And basically forces the bios out of memory to provide its own services.)

The normal implementation of EFI has a bios-like chip that runs the POST and then does loads EFI, usually from a flash or NVRAM chip, but it could be from the harddrive also.

The advantage of a flash chip is that EFI applications providing recovery or diagonstic utilities could be placed on the chip, and used even when the hard drive is not working.

Back to what EFI is: Besides the bios replacement that uses drivers loaded in memory, allowing more flexibility tha the IBM bios, EFI is also a pre-boot Micro-OS. It runs EFI applications, which include boot loaders, diagnostic utilities or the EFI shell.

Really it is quite interesting. It would be nice if this page better reflected what EFI really is. 17:40, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

article gone

I couldn't see the article. I got the page for a non-existent article. I hope this is a temporary problem. --MarSch 09:37, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]