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UEFI, what is it good for?
THE PC BIOS REPLACEMENT UEFI is poised to transform the speed with which PCs boot up. The only problem is, its been promising to do that for years.
The web is abuzz with the news that UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is almost ready to speed up boot times, with many reports saying that we could start to see its benefits, in PCs that boot up while your morning tea is still hot, by next year.
UEFI aims to replace the PC BIOS, which by now is looking a bit clunky and slow, and UEFI could shave the amount of time you spend at the office genuinely unable to work from some 25 seconds to just a few seconds. Which is bad news for anyone who likes to moan about their journey in, but good news for clock-watching productivity nuts.
The BIOS has been around and in use for some 25 years, longer than we suspect Steve Jobs has owned his favourite black polo neck shirt, but even UEFI has its roots in the early 2000s, making it, in technology years, a bit old.
It made one of its first appearances in Intel's Itanium systems back in 2000. Since then it has appeared fairly regularly, and has won favour at Gateway, Microsoft where it is a part of its X64 system, Apple - it appears in Bootcamp - IBM and HP, where it remains a staple in Itanium systems. In these instances it is supported, but too often is let down by firmware that is not.
So questions persist, other than the increased speed is it any better than the PC BIOS? Perhaps we'll find out after next week's plugfest. Until then, we probably won't take the BBC's word for it.
The other questions concern who owns it. UEFI used to be an Intel specification, back when it was named EFI, so there might be some less than friendly patents or conditions on it, unless it is an open standard. There is also the issue of whether it will apply to both down-level hardware, or just suit newer kit. And so on.
We are currently waiting to hear back from UEFI. µ
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Well, western digital released their first 3TB hard disk now. Curiosly, they send it with a PCIe card, so that proper hardware and drivers are used which are capable of adressing more than 2^32 sectors.
For booting, UEFI and x64 is still required on windows.
"The biggest one facing today's systems is drive partition size limits. Legacy 16-bit BIOS cannot boot from a partition larger than 2.2TB and drive manufacturers are ready to go to market with 3TB+ drives."
Completely, utterly, false and something that I would expect from a marketroid not an engineer. Oh, wait: Senior Technical *Marketing* Engineer; I'm guessing that's a fancy name for marketroid.
There is NOTHING preventing you guys adding GPT support to your BIOS (Intel arm twisting or "marketing payments" notwithstanding). But as I mentioned, EFI is great for you BIOS manufacturers, so I'm not surprised the marketing department is latching on to anything that sounds plausible.
In reality, though, you already CAN boot from a GPT disk on a BIOS-based system, as long as you use something other than Windows. Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris (long may it rest) all work fine. MS are dragging their heels - perhaps the guy that did the boot code quit and they've been too scared to touch it for the last 5 years?
My name is Brian Richardson. I am one of the people interviewed by the BBC for their recent article on UEFI. Along with my technical marketing role at AMI I am also a member of the UEFI Industry Communications Working Group.
I sent you an e-mail hours after the article went live, so UEFI has contacted you :) Since I haven't found your reply yet, I'll repost my e-mail here.
UEFI has been run by an industry association since 2005. No one company has sole ownership over the specification. I was on the board of directors when the Unified EFI Forum was established, and the group's purpose is to make sure the spec is available for industry input. It's the same model used by the USB Implementers Forum and the PCI Special Interest Group to create industry specifications.
Details here - http://www.uefi.org/about/
UEFI solves a number of limitations that come from the design of the original PC BIOS. Many of these focus on developers and PC manufacturers, but several benefits can be seen directly by users.
The biggest one facing today's systems is drive partition size limits. Legacy 16-bit BIOS cannot boot from a partition larger than 2.2TB and drive manufacturers are ready to go to market with 3TB+ drives.
http://www.uefi.org/learning_center/UEFI_MBR_Limits_v2.pdf
There are also previous articles on UEFI run at Wired & CNN that may give you more information, along with my "Ask a BIOS Guy" blog at edc.intel.com.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/05/computers.bootup.speed/
http://community.edc.intel.com/t5/New-to-Intel-Architecture-Blog/Ask-a-BIOS-Guy-quot-Why-UEFI-quot/ba-p/2781
Feel free to contact me if you have further questions.
Brian Richardson
Senior Technical Marketing Engineer
American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI)
Twitter: @askabiosguy
P.S. There's no spec requirement for 'DRM' in UEFI. The spec is available at uefi.org so take a look for yourself.
Your system would take much the same time to start up with EFI/UEFI, since most of the time is spent by the RAID cards waiting for drives to spin up/initialize.
The only time that's available for reducing is between when the power comes on to the end of the memory detection/"checking", which on most system is typically in the 3-5 second range. Everything after this is add-in cards initializing, which takes the same amount of time regardless of whether there's UEFI or a basic BIOS under the hood.
UEFI basically came from the server world, so the focus was on features, not on speed. Booting up a small OS (EFI) to get the required support to boot the main OS off iSCSI (and be able to run diagnostic tools to fix this when it breaks) makes sense in that world. Claiming that it will magically and dramatically reduce the initialization time for add-in cards in a consumer PC is really pretty laughable though.
UEFI's been slow to adoption since it's hugely complicated and doesn't really solve any problems. The spec alone is ~2000 pages and doesn't even tell you how to initialize a computer. A lot of vendors simply wrap their old BIOS, sans UEFI PEI/DXE code provided by Intel, into the UEFI framework using what they call the CSM ("Compatibility Support Module"). Also, there is nothing in the legacy BIOS model that precludes fast boot.
If you're looking fast, simple, *and* open, look toward Coreboot: http://www.coreboot.org . It used to be called LinuxBIOS, and has been making x86 systems boot really fast for over a decade :-)
Of course, Intel's been working hard to promote UEFI and wants to keep a lot of hardware init code under wraps. Fortunately, AMD and VIA have been great at contributing code or at least docs necessary to initialize their hardware, so the Coreboot folks have modern chipset and CPU support for those vendors.
Heh, that's so true. I have the same problem.
I notice the only thing that slows my system down is the multitude of RAID cards that I have whilst they are initialising the RAID array and searching for connected drives.
Onboard P-ATA initialise...VIA RAID card initialise...Asus U3S6 initialise...then once that's done, the Crucial C300 SSD screams along and Windows 7 is loaded within 10 seconds.
On my system, the BIOS takes longer than Windows to load...
I notice the only thing that slows my system down is the multitude of RAID cards that I have whilst they are initialising the RAID array and searching for connected drives.
Onboard P-ATA initialise...VIA RAID card initialise...Asus U3S6 initialise...then once that's done, the Crucial C300 SSD screams along and Windows 7 is loaded within 10 seconds.
On my system, the BIOS takes longer than Windows to load...
Linus sums it up pretty well:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/6884
It's great for Intel because it encourages hiding of hardware specs and allows them to be a lot more secretive.
It's great for BIOS manufacturers since it's less work for them, and it kills the Open Source BIOS competition (no specs, just OSI-incompatible binary blobs).
It's great for MS and the MAFIAA since it allows the DRM code to run regardless of the OS.
Not really that great for consumers though ...
In 30s take my system to boot the W7 64 and I don't have a fancy machine. Q6600@3.8, 4GB DDR@850, and a very fast WD 640GB. The slowest part is the W7. On Linux is WAAYYYYY faster.
Leave BIOS and sort the OS.
The only parts that take the longest while boot up is Windows!
Of coz, unless you are on a ancient machine (e.g. 44Mhz CPU or things like that)...
seems like some newer systems already have some fancy/overblown bios/uefi loaded. never have I seen these stuff speed up the system, usually it feels sluggish and just useless. simple bios that exposes hardware is just fine. give pc makers the option to differentiate/"add value" and you'll end up with vista experience on the hardware side. and the talk about ms requiring uefi for windows.next (or whatever they'll cook in few years) just seems bs - Ballmer won't skip upgrade purchases.
The problem with EFI is that its a thing the DRM creeps see as a way to clamp down people's property even more, and if played right to even exclude the option as to what OS you can install.
So I'd rather have an old style BIOS for that reason.
it's the old 'flawed by design' issue.
so, they will just have to make coffee machines that can keep up and deliver your piping hot few seconds.
Not difficult I expect
If you've bought a laptop in the last couple of years, chances are good that you're already booting UEFI and didn't even know it. If you're BIOS says Insyde, AMI Aptio, or Phoenix SecureCore, you're running EFI. Many OEM's made the switch over to UEFI on their mobile products ~2007 with Intel's Montevina platform.
You know the performance numbers on these 3TB drives aren't very good at all, at least so far. I think if you're considering booting to a 3TB drive you need to reconsider what you're actually doing.
They're great for storing data, not so hot for booting from. Get a flash drive, or a smaller hard drive to boot from - it will be considerably faster. Besides, when you're not booting from it, you can setup a cheapo software raid and get some redundancy on that 3TB as well.
I'm not sure what UEFI is good for, but it's obviously being pushed hard by Intel. Perhaps there's a patent-based end-run around AMD in the wings, perhaps not.
In any case, Intel is trying to push PC vendors to UEFI by not giving them firmware (BIOS) source code, but only UEFI binary code.
The 3TB boot "requirement" for UEFI (over BIOS) is only as real as PC manufacturers and BIOS vendors let it get. It'd be easy enough for PC makers and BIOS vendors to agree on a way to boot these monster (at least for right now) drives.
Because Windows for x86 and x86_64 has not supported EFI/UEFI. So nobody wants it.
What exactly this nifty new marketing term, X64 from MS, is, who knows?
UEFI is urgent on the desktop. To run a single 3 TB drive in a system (as boot disk), which would have been out already, were it not for compatibility issues.
To run windows on this, you need UEFI bios+x64 vista/7