Posted on Thursday, March 16 2006 @ 1:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
At the IDF last week Intel talked about the progress of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which will eventually replace the aging Basic Input Output System (BIOS).
According to Intel, the EFI specification allows far greater customizability than the BIOS. With current BIOSes, there are a lot of legacy devices that must be defined in order for the platform to work. Serial ports, legacy I/O such as PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and other old legacy enumerated devices must be defined. This not only puts a toll on a system, it leaves potential hazards for system conflicts.
Another key area that EFI tries to address is the constant headache of moving OS installations around from computer to computer. For example, if a customer upgrades his or her motherboard, it is very likely that the Windows installation will fail to boot very far simply because device enumeration occurs at the BIOS and then is enumerated again at the OS level
Read on over at
Daily Tech.
