What is UEFI? What is the difference from the BIOS?

UEFI, full name unified extensible Firmware Interface, or "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", is a standard specification for a new type of interface, a standard firmware interface for computers, designed to replace the BIOS (basic input/ Output system). This standard was created by more than 140 technology companies in the UEFI Alliance, including Microsoft Corporation. UEFI is designed to improve software interoperability and address BIOS limitations.

To learn more about UEFI, you have to start with the BIOS. As we all know, every ordinary computer has a BIOS that loads the most basic code of the computer, takes on the task of initializing hardware, detecting hardware functions, and booting the operating system. Uefi is a concept relative to the BIOS, which is used for the operating system to automatically from the pre-boot operating environment, loaded into an operating system, so as to achieve a simple start-up procedure to save time. Traditional BIOS technology is gradually being replaced by UEFI, and in recent new factory PCs, many of them already use UEFI, which is where the trend is to install the operating system using UEFI mode.

What is the difference between UEFI and bios? What are the advantages?

As a successor to the traditional BIOS (Basic input/output System), UEFI has a number of features that are not available to predecessors, such as a graphical interface, a variety of operations, the ability to embed hardware drivers, and so on. These features make uefi easier to use, more versatile, and more convenient than a traditional BIOS. Windows 8 announced its full support for UEFI at the start of its release, which has prompted many motherboard vendors to turn to UEFI as one of the standard configurations of the motherboard.

Uefi has thrown away the issue of long-time self-checking in traditional BIOS, allowing hardware initialization and booting the system to be simple and fast. In other words, UEFI has turned the bios of the computer into a small, compact OS that is cured on the motherboard, and the development language of the UEFI itself has been transformed from assembler to C, and the addition of high-level languages makes it possible for vendors to develop uefi in depth.

The following features about UEFI come from the Microsoft website:

1. Improve security by protecting pre-boot or pre-boot processes against Bootkit attacks.
2, shorten the start time and resume from the sleep state time.
3. Supports drives with capacity exceeding 2.2 TB.
4, support 64-bit modern firmware device drivers, the system can use them during the boot process to address more than 17.2 billion GB of memory.
5. UEFI hardware can be used in conjunction with the BIOS.

The following differences about BIOS and UEFI come from the network:

UEFI is an upgrade alternative to the BIOS. With respect to the BIOS and UEFI comparisons, UEFI is more powerful than the BIOS when compared only from the system startup principle, because the UEFI itself is already the equivalent of a micro operating system, with the convenience of:

First, Uefi already has file system support that can directly read files in the FAT partition. What is a file system? Simply put, the file system is the operating system organization and management of the file, a straightforward point is that the data on the hard disk as a file presented to the user. FAT32, NTFS are common file system types.

Second, you can develop applications that run directly under UEFI, which usually ends with EFI. Since UEFI can directly identify files in a FAT partition, there are applications that can be run directly in it. Then you can completely make the Windows Installer into an EFI-type application, and then put it in any FAT partition to run directly, so that the installation of the Windows operating system that seemed a little bit complicated in the past suddenly became very simple, It's as simple as opening a browser under Windows. And in fact, that's the case.

Finally, be aware that these are not the BIOS. Because the system boot code (included in the master boot record) must be read from the specified sector on the hard disk before booting the operating system under the BIOS, boot the operating system from the active partition. The operation of the sector is far less straightforward than the operation of the files in the partition, so booting the Windows operating system under the BIOS, we have to use some tools to configure the device to meet the boot requirements. Under Uefi, none of this is needed, no more master boot records , no more active partitions , no tools required, just copy the installation files to a FAT32 (master) partition/U disk, and boot from this partition/U disk, Installing Windows is so simple.

　　

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What is UEFI? What is the difference from the BIOS?