Beyond BIOS

Chapter 1 – Introduction

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

—Marshall McLuhan

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and from the Intel Framework specifications to the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications. Note the omission of the word “Framework” from the title of the present volume. Some of the changes that have occurred since the first edition of this book include the migration of much of the Intel Framework specification content into the five volumes of the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications, which are ...