The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI replaces the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface originally present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers, with most UEFI firmware implementations providing legacy support for BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even with no operating system installed.
Intel developed the original Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification. Some of the EFI’s practices and data formats mirror those from Microsoft Windows. In 2005, UEFI deprecated EFI 1.10 (the final release of EFI). The Unified EFI Forum is the industry body that manages the UEFI specification.
Advantages of UEFI
The interface defined by the EFI specification includes data tables that contain platform information, and boot and runtime services that are available to the OS loader and OS. UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages over a traditional BIOS system:
- Ability to use large disks (over 2 TB) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT)
- CPU-independent architecture
- CPU-independent drivers
- Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability
- Modular design
- Backward and forward compatibility
Compatibility
UEFI requires the firmware and operating system loader (or kernel) to be size-matched; for example, a 64-bit UEFI firmware implementation can load only a 64-bit operating system (OS) boot loader or kernel. After the system transitions from “Boot Services” to “Runtime Services”, the operating system kernel takes over. At this point, the kernel can change processor modes if it desires, but this bars usage of the runtime services (unless the kernel switches back again). As of version 3.15, the Linux kernel supports 64-bit kernels to be booted on 32-bit UEFI firmware implementations running on x86-64 CPUs, with UEFI handover support from a UEFI boot loader as the requirement. UEFI handover protocol deduplicates the UEFI initialization code between the kernel and UEFI boot loaders, leaving the initialization to be performed only by the Linux kernel’s UEFI boot stub.
Disk Device Compatibility
In addition to the standard PC disk partition scheme that uses a master boot record (MBR), UEFI also works with a new partitioning scheme called GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is free from many of the limitations of MBR. In particular, the MBR limits on the number and size of disk partitions (up to four primary partitions per disk, and up to 2 TiB (2 × 240 bytes) per disk) are relaxed. More specifically, GPT allows for a maximum disk and partition size of 8 ZiB (8 × 270 bytes).
