Can anybody explain why people like UEFI?

[Recursion]

I'm trying to get what this gives us that MBR didn't, and I'm coming up blank.

[Phillip McCleod]

1. i don't know if i *like* uefi but as a mac user..

running an efi machine dual-boot might take some extra care and software (rEFIt) but i will say that i burn through linux distributions for fun but this is the same exact installation of os x that came with my machine years back. rock solid. always boots no matter what horrible *nix-y things i do to the rest of my hdd. toss 'fink', osxfuse and ext2fuse in there and suddenly they'll even talk to each other.. awkwardly true but enough for osx to be a safety net. need to download and burn a new disk because i goofed and broke linux irreparably? at a coffee shop? no problem. i can even get to the iso on the linux partition.

more generally and as a tech i will say i'm looking forward to the bygone days of bios. i don't like having to remember if it's f2 or f12 or f1 or esc on an hp or dell or acer or.. there's better things to store in that part of my brain. i think a *little* standardization isn't a *bad* thing. it gave us ascii and ansi.. and the internet.

last point in defense of uefi. a quote..

http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/The-30-year-long-Reign-of-BIOS-is-Over-Why-UEFI-Will-Rock-Your/ba-p/198

BIOS was developed in 1979 and is far beyond out-of-date. Its limited execution space (1024 Kbytes!) and its limited number of addressable devices causes more and more problems in today’s architecture. Your IT systems need to handle an increasing amount of devices. BIOS will fail you at some point – it will simply deny handling the device or may even cause problems in an OS environment.

Speaking of devices: Thanks to today’s vast number of USB ports, PCI devices, or built-in controllers (none of which existed 20-30 years ago), BIOS struggles with initializing them one-by-one. This struggle results in delays of up to 30 seconds before the actual operating system start its first boot sequence!

Furthermore, the BIOS is physically unable to boot from hard disks with more than 2.1 TB. Back in the 80s, that kind of capacity seemed like a fairy tale, but we are being ushered into an era of hard disks with multiple terabytes of disk space.

[sir pball]

11. Pre-Intel Macs' firmware utterly spanked UEFI

Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.
...
Open Firmware Forth code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a subset of the Open Firmware library.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

It went far beyond building a hardware tree and getting the bootloader running - OF is pretty much a nano-OS unto itself that runs a complete Forth interpreter. People can and have written complete albeit simple programs in it; the flexibility and management features it offers are still unmatched today. Pity Apple didn't stick with custom hardware when they made the architecture switch.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. It gets us past 1980 boot technology?

[Recursion]

3. What was lacking about 1980 boot technology? (nt)

[Warren Stupidity]

4. If you've ever dealt with bios code you wouldn't ask that question.

[Recursion]

5. I write Forth code, sometimes for boot sectors

BIOS is the worst possible idea, except for everything else we've tried.

[sir pball]

8. You write Forth, you must have used OpenFirmware.

IMO going away from OF for the Intel Macs was one of the more boneheaded things Apple did* - OF was elegant, sophisticated, and powerful. Did everything UEFI attempts to (except for the whole "security" bullshit) and more, just better and leaner.

* - I get why they went to UEFI, so as to be able to use more commodity hardware, but they already had the custom manufacturing chain in place...couldn't have been that hard to just swap the processors and custom chipset.

[Recursion]

9. I love OF

I think comparing it to BIOS or UEFI is like comparing the Batmobile to a regular car, which is why I wasn't thinking of it in this case. Sure do miss the old PPC Macs; they ran OpenBSD great.

[sir pball]

10. I'll give UEFI a teensy bit of credit for at least trying

It IS a damn sight more advanced than BIOS but it's pretty clear to me it's about controlling the user and the extra features are just a fringe benefit - else they could have just adopted OF

I'm assuming you've seen the Towers of Hanoi in OF, that blew my mind.

[hobbit709]

6. Damfino.

The only real purpose is to allow hard drives larger than 2 TB. The other thing is that it allows manufacturers to lock out any OS that they don't approve of.

Just had that problem on a Lenovo laptop with Windows 8. Would not boot from DVD drive with any OS other than Windows 8. But it did boot fine from an external DVD drive, which was how I installed Mint on it.

[pokerfan]

7. I think we know why Microsoft likes it (nt)

[toddaa]

12. UEFI and Secure Boot are not the same thing

Secure boot, by itself, is actually a good idea. As long as you own the keys. Otherwise, it's restricted boot.

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot

[hobbit709]

13. If it's in the UEFi then as far as I'm concerned it's part of it.

And I can guarantee in a Lenovo you cannot change it.

[toddaa]

14. Lenovo's implementation of UEFI is the problem

Have you read Linus' recent profanity laced rant, when a Redhat developer tried to commit a patch to the kernel allowing an MS "blessed" key be added dynamically?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/linus-torvalds-i-will-not-change-linux-to-deep-throat-microsoft/

Ranks up there with his NVidia flameout.