September 2014
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
11h 9m
English
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a relatively new specification that is quickly being adopted by hardware manufacturers to replace Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interfaces. BIOS interfaces have existed since the inception of the personal computer and have begun to limit severely the flexibility and capabilities that hardware and operating system manufactures can implement. Compared to UEFI, BIOS is slow, insecure, and fragile; UEFI offers many advantages such as drastically reduced boot times, larger hard drive support, and Secure Boot. For a complete discussion of UEFI, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824898.aspx