UEFI - 下一代BIOS标准

刚刚和在intel实习的同学聊了一会儿，他们最近好像在做UEFI的测试。据他介绍，UEFI是一个可扩展的独立于OS的下一代BIOS标准，intel正在尝试大力的推广此标准。从网上搜索了一下，大致了解了一点UEFI的知识。下面是UEFI官方网站上的一段简介：

UEFI is a community effort by many companies in the personal-computer industry to modernize the booting process. UEFI capable systems are already shipping, and many more are in preparation. During the transition to UEFI, most platform firmware will continue to support legacy (BIOS) booting as well, to accommodate legacy-only operating systems.

UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface". The UEFI specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications.

看上去这个UEFI标准还是很有前景的，以后OS就能和主板独立开来了，而不像现在换了不同厂商不同的主板OS就不能load了（话说上周六去太平洋换了主板就碰到了这个问题，最后只能重装系统）。

具体有关UEFI的更多细节，可以访问他们的官方网站www.uefi.org