Uefi-bios

[joff]

Hello,

Given that you seem to take pride in following the cutting edge of technology (it seems to be the tone in any DDR3 or SSD article) I was wondering whether or not you'd be willing to explore companies' UEFI efforts, and how far along they are with their UEFI-supporting motherboards. I know MSI has been tooting the EFI horn for a while, but we have yet to see any product. Maybe you could lure others out of hiding regarding their products, and perhaps look at the ones already on the market?

http://www.uefi.org/about/

[Olin Coles]

Hello,

I was wondering whether or not you'd be willing to explore companies' UEFI efforts, and how far along they are with their UEFI-supporting motherboards. I know MSI has been tooting the EFI horn for a while, but we have yet to see any product. Maybe you could lure others out of hiding regarding their products, and perhaps look at the ones already on the market?

Hmmm.... This is new territory for me, and I'm glad you introduced it. In the next few days I will finish up my pending projects and take a look into this. If you don't see any follow-up here, feel free to remind me. :)

Also, what interest do you have in this technology?

[joff]

It interests me because purportedly it's going to allow for more options and choice for us users. It's coded in C rather than assembly like the BIOS, and obviously allows for more addressable memory space and a larger footprint. Hiring C coders is easier than finding good assembly coders - my vision is that we will see more different functions implemented in firmware by various motherboard manufacturers, and some true competition. Right now it seems like they all have the same bar standouts like DFI and Foxconn.

Then there's the potential for cutting down the boot time, along with SSDs it should give us some rapid bootup compared to plain BIOS. It also supports mouse and USB keyboards, some BIOSes need PS/2 keyboards to work at all. It is stored as a file so it is possible to access it directly while Windows is running - no need to choose between rebooting into BIOS or mediocre software overclocking tools, you can alter it directly from the desktop environment without any loss in stability or functions.

And then there's just the plain shininess of new stuff, I like to trim away legacy stuff from my builds and if I could get rid of IDE, platter drives for the boot drive, PS/2, regular BIOS (UEFI builds on the BIOS so it wouldn't be gone, but still) and the floppy port on my next build that would just be nice for nothing but the 'new car smell' it would give. :o

www.bit-tech.net have been running a few articles on it, and it certainly peeked my interest.