 The workings of the Extensible Firmware Interface The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. EFI is intended as a significantly improved replacement of the old BIOS firmware interface historically used by all IBM PC compatible personal computers[1]. The EFI specification was originally developed by Intel, and is part[verification needed] of Intel's corporate-wide push for ubiquitous digital rights management on the PC platform. EFI is now developed by the Unified EFI Forum and is officially known as Unified EFI (UEFI). Image File history File links Efi-simple. ...
Look up interface in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ...
In computing, firmware is software that is embedded in a hardware device. ...
BIOS, in computing, stands for Basic Input/Output System also incorrectly known as Basic Integrated Operating System. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ...
Digital Rights Management (generally abbreviated to DRM) is any of several technologies used by publishers (or copyright owners) to control access to and usage of digital data (such as software, music, movies) and hardware, handling usage restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work. ...
The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple, Lenovo, American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies, and Insyde Software. ...
History
The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel-HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. PC BIOS limitations (16-bit processor mode, 1 MB addressable space, PC AT hardware dependencies, etc.) were seen as clearly unacceptable for the larger servers Itanium was intended to run on. The initial effort to address these concerns was called Intel Boot Initiative and was later renamed to EFI[2]. Itanium 2 logo Old Itanium logo The Itanium is an IA-64 microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. ...
The IBM Personal Computer/AT (IBM 5170), more commonly known as the IBM AT and also sometimes called the PC AT or PC/AT, was IBMs second-generation PC, designed around the Intel 80286 microprocessor running at 6 MHz and released in 1984. ...
EFI specification 1.02 was released by Intel on December 12, 2000. (Version 1.01 was the original issue; it had incorrect legal and trademark information and was quickly withdrawn[3].)
EFI specification 1.10 was released by Intel on December 1, 2002. It included the EFI driver model as well as several minor enhancements to 1.02.
In 2005, Intel contributed this specification to the UEFI Forum, who is now responsible for its development[4]. EFI was renamed to Unified EFI (UEFI) to reflect this; most documentation uses both terms interchangeably. The UEFI Forum released version 2.0 of the UEFI specification on January 31, 2006; as of December 2006, it is the latest publicly available specification. The Unified EFI Forum or UEFI Forum (where UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is an alliance between several leading technology companies including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple, Lenovo, American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies, and Insyde Software. ...
The UEFI forum is working on a 2.1 version that would add or improve cryptography, network authentication and IPv6 support[5]. The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κÏυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γÏάφω gráfo write) is the study of message secrecy. ...
Some existing enhancements to PC BIOS, such as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) and System Management BIOS (SMBIOS), are also present in EFI, as they do not rely on a 16-bit runtime interface. The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification is an open industry standard first released in December 1996 developed by HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba that defines common interfaces for hardware recognition, motherboard and device configuration and power management. ...
System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) is a specification to lay out data structures (and access methods) in a BIOS which allows a user or application to store and retrieve information specifically about the PC in question. ...
Contents
 A more detailed version of the image above The interface defined by the EFI specification includes data tables which contain platform information, and boot and runtime services which are available to the OS loader and OS. Image File history File links Efi_flowchart_extended. ...
Image File history File links Efi_flowchart_extended. ...
Services EFI defines boot services, which include text and graphical console support on various devices, bus, block and file services, and runtime services, such as date, time and NVRAM services. Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) is a type of computer memory chip which does not lose its information when power is turned off. ...
Device drivers In addition to standard architecture-specific device drivers, the EFI specification provides for a processor-independent device driver environment, called EFI Byte Code or EBC. EBC code is interpreted by the system firmware on the target system. In that sense, EBC is similar to Open Firmware, the hardware-independent firmware used in PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers and Sun Microsystems SPARC computers, amongst others. Open Firmware (also, OpenBoot) is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. ...
IBM PowerPC 601 Microprocessor PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. ...
The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ...
Architecture-specific EFI device drivers can also be run from the operating system, with some restrictions. This allows the OS to rely on EFI for basic graphics and network support until better suited OS native drivers can be installed.
Boot Manager An EFI boot manager is also used to select and load the operating system, removing the need for a dedicated boot loader mechanism (the boot loader becomes a type of EFI application). An Internet payphone loading Windows XP In computing, booting is a bootstrapping process that starts operating systems when the user turns on a computer system. ...
Disk Support In addition to the standard PC disk partition scheme, EFI adds support for a GUID Partition Table (GPT), which does not suffer from the same limitations. The EFI specification does not include a description for a file system; implementations of EFI typically support FAT32 as their file system. GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. ...
In computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ...
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system that was developed for MS-DOS and used in consumer versions of Microsoft Windows up to and including Windows Me. ...
The EFI Shell The EFI specification also describes a small shell environment; rather than booting directly into a full OS, the user can boot to the EFI shell. The shell is an EFI application; it can reside directly within the platform ROM, or on a device for which the drivers are in ROM. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Shell_(computing). ...
The shell can be used to execute pre-boot programs, such as setup, OS install, diagnostic or configuration utilities, and system flash updates; it can also be used to play CDs or DVDs without having to boot to a complete operating system. Shell commands also make it possible to copy or move files and directories between supported file systems. Drivers can be loaded and unloaded, and a complete TCP/IP stack can also be started from the shell.
The EFI shell supports scripting through .nsh files, which are analogous to DOS batch files. Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Windows commands In MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows, a batch file is a text file containing a series of commands intended to be executed by the command interpreter. ...
Shell command names are often inherited from the DOS command interpreter or the Unix shell. The shell can be viewed as a functional replacement for the DOS command interpreter. COMMAND.COM is the name for the default operating system shell (or command line interpreter) for DOS and 16/32bits versions of Windows (95/98/98 SE/Me). ...
Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ...
Extensions Extensions to EFI can be loaded from virtually any non-volatile storage device attached to the computer. For example, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) can sell systems with an EFI partition on the hard drive which would add additional functions to the standard EFI firmware stored on the motherboard's ROM. Non-volatile memory, or non-volatile storage, is computer memory that can retain the stored information even when not powered. ...
An original equipment manufacturer (frequently abbreviated OEM) is a company that builds products or components that are used in products sold by another company (often called a value-added reseller, or VAR). ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is a class of storage media used in computers and other electronic devices. ...
Implementation and adoption
Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI The Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI (originally codenamed “Tiano”) is a complete, legacy-free firmware implementation that includes support for EFI. It can also support a legacy PC BIOS through a compatibility support module. Legacy code is source code that relates to a no-longer supported or manufactured operating system or other computer system. ...
In particular, the Framework includes all the steps needed to initialize the platform after power-on; these are not defined as part of the EFI specification.
Intel does not make the complete Framework available to end-users; it is available through independent BIOS vendors (such as American Megatrends (AMI) and Insyde Software) as part of their firmware offerings[6]. American Megatrends Incorporated (AMI) is a Georgia, USA based hardware company that creates PC hardware and firmware. ...
Insyde Software is listed on the second board (the GreTai) of the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE), stock code 6231. ...
A part of the Framework has been released as open source to the TianoCore project. This implementation covers EFI and some hardware initialization code, but does not constitute feature-complete firmware by itself. Several licenses have been used for this code, including the BSD license and the Eclipse Public License. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
The BSD license is a permissive license and is one of the most widely used free software licenses. ...
The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is a license for free software. ...
Platforms that use EFI or the Framework Intel's first Itanium workstations and servers, released in 2000, supported EFI 1.02. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ...
Itanium 2 logo Old Itanium logo The Itanium is an IA-64 microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. ...
Hewlett-Packard's first Itanium 2 systems, released in 2002, supported EFI 1.10; they were able to boot Windows, Linux, and HP/UX. The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ...
Itanium 2 logo The Itanium 2 is an IA-64 64-bit microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Intel, and introduced on July 8, 2002. ...
1. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Linux distributions. ...
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packards proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system. ...
In November 2003, Gateway introduced the Gateway 610 Media Center, the first x86 Windows-based computer system to use EFI. The 610 used Insyde Software's InsydeH2O EFI firmware, based on the Framework. It still relied on a legacy BIOS implemented as a compatibility support module to boot Windows. 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Gateway, Inc. ...
Insyde Software is listed on the second board (the GreTai) of the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE), stock code 6231. ...
In January 2006, Apple Computer shipped their first Intel-based Macintosh computers. These systems use EFI and the Framework instead of Open Firmware, which had been used on their previous PowerPC-based systems.[7] Using Boot Camp, which includes a compatibility support module, these systems are also able to boot Windows XP. For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ...
Apple Inc. ...
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ...
Open Firmware (also, OpenBoot) is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. ...
Boot Camp is a software assistant made available by Apple Computer that assists users in installing Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Home, Professional, and Media Center Editions only, not Tablet PC Edition) on Intel-based Macintosh computers. ...
The grand majority of Intel motherboards ship with Framework-based firmware.
During 2005 more than one million Intel systems shipped with the Framework[8]. New mobile, desktop and server products, using the Framework, started shipping in 2006.
Since 2005, EFI has also been implemented on non-PC architectures, such as embedded systems based on XScale cores[9]. An embedded system is a special-purpose system in which the computer is completely encapsulated by the device it controls. ...
XScale is Intels name for their line of StrongARM-based RISC microprocessors and microcontrollers, which they aquired from DECs Digital Semiconductor division as the side-effect of a lawsuit between the two companies. ...
Intel currently offers PC motherboards supporting EFI. All boards that use the Intel 945 chipset series support EFI. However, no vendor except Apple, Inc. has yet taken advantage of this. A firmware update could enable EFI on these motherboards, but no such update has yet been released, most likely because there is no EFI-capable 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows.[10]
Operating Systems Linux systems have been able to use EFI at boot time since early 2000, using the elilo EFI boot loader. elilo is the only means to boot Linux on IA-64 platforms; it can also be used on IA-32 platforms. As of December 2006, there is no version of elilo for x64 mode. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Linux distributions. ...
elilo is the standard Linux boot loader for EFI-based PC hardware. ...
HP/UX has used EFI as its boot mechanism on IA-64 systems since 2002. HP-UX is Hewlett-Packards proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system. ...
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for IA64, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, and Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition, all of which are for the Intel Itanium family of processors, support EFI, a requirement of the platform.[11] Microsoft is one of few companies engaging itself in the console wars Where they are up against sony, nintendo, and of course sharps new console which may cause a threat. ...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. ...
In computing, IA-64 (Instruction Architecture-64) is a 64-bit processor architecture developed in cooperation by Intel and Hewlett-Packard for processors such as Itanium and Itanium 2. ...
Windows XP 64-bit Edition is a version of Microsofts Windows XP operating system designed to run on Intels Itanium processors. ...
Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptible, interruptible, graphical and business-oriented operating system that is designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor 32-bit Intel x86 computers. ...
Itanium 2 logo Old Itanium logo The Itanium is an IA-64 microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. ...
Apple Computer has adopted EFI for its line of Intel-based Macs. Apple Inc. ...
The Intel Core Duo and Intel Core Solo mobile microprocessors are used in the Apple Macintosh Intel-processor based computers. ...
Microsoft plans to introduce UEFI support for 64-bit x64 with Windows Server "Longhorn". EFI support for x64 versions of Windows Vista will be included in a later service pack.[12] There will never be official support for EFI booting on 32-bit CPUs due to lack of support from PC manufacturers and vendors. Microsoft is one of few companies engaging itself in the console wars Where they are up against sony, nintendo, and of course sharps new console which may cause a threat. ...
Windows Server Longhorn is the codename for the next server operating system from Microsoft. ...
Windows Vista is the name of the latest release of Microsoft Windows, a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, and media centers. ...
See also Open Firmware (also, OpenBoot) is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. ...
BIOS, in computing, stands for Basic Input/Output System also incorrectly known as Basic Integrated Operating System. ...
ACPI stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, which is the alternative to APM. It is an open industry specification co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba. ...
System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) is a specification to lay out data structures (and access methods) in a BIOS which allows a user or application to store and retrieve information specifically about the PC in question. ...
AMD64 Logo AMD64 (also x86-64 or x64) is a 64-bit microprocessor architecture and corresponding instruction set designed by Advanced Micro Devices. ...
Extended Memory 64-bit Technology (EM64T) is Intels implementation of AMD64, a 64-bit extension to the IA-32 architecture. ...
OpenBIOS is a free software, portable Open Firmware implementation which is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. ...
LinuxBIOS is a free software project, endorsed by the Free Software Foundation [1], aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware found in most computers with a lightweight BIOS designed to perform only the minimum of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit operating system. ...
References - ^ Michael Kinney. "Solving BIOS Boot Issues with EFI". Intel DeveloperUPDATEMagazine. September, 2000, page 1.
- ^ Dong Wei, Beyond BIOS (foreword), Intel Press, 2006, ISBN 9-780974-364902
- ^ See the Revision History section of specification version 1.10
- ^ Unified EFI Forum. "UEFI - About UEFI."
- ^ John G. Spooner, [PC Firmware: The Next Generation http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1918324,00.asp], eWeek, February 6, 2006
- ^ See Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI on the Intel site
- ^ Apple Computer. "Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, Second Edition: Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)."
- ^ Intel, Framework Overview
- ^ See Overview of the Intel Platform Innovation Framework
- ^ An Intel pdf with information about EFI on their boards [1]
- ^ Microsoft Windows Server TechCenter. "Extensible Firmware Interface."
- ^ Microsoft bombshell: no EFI support for Vista
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