Conclusion
The industry has come a long way with UEFI. There have been various approaches to modularize the boot process and create a flexible standard. None of them were a real success, but it seems that Intel may have won at least some support with its ambitious Itanium project. EFI, which today is governed by the United EFI Industry Forum, controls the existing UEFI standards. The Extensible Firmware Interface will gradually replace the conventional BIOS and offer new interfaces to operating systems, facilitating boot-up and introducing a lot of flexibility through EFI applications and OS-independent device drivers.
Although the recent 2.3 specification is mature, the industry has not yet adopted the new standard. From an end-user’s perspective, this is difficult to understand. Apple, IBM, HP, and a few others have already proved that UEFI can indeed be implemented into production systems. Meanwhile, the entire motherboard business is pretty much supporting UEFI on paper. We found only a few exceptions that were mostly aimed at utilizing UEFI for improving visual appearances, unfortunately. Even though UEFI features are more interesting for system builders, the new standard also represents the only way to properly handle hard drives that exceed a total capacity of 2TB.
We failed in trying to get a 4TB RAID 0 array (2 x 2TB drives) to work on an Intel DP55KG, using its on-board Matrix RAID solution. It currently limits bootable arrays to a maximum of 2TB. Intel’s self-imposed limitations aside, we were fortunately successful in creating a 3TB system drive in Windows 7 with UEFI enabled using an external storage box by LaCie. The box employs RAID internally, and hence is a perfect showcase of what will happen once larger hard drives become available.
Finally, we can’t help but encourage everyone to keep an eye on the platform vendors and encourage them to bring their UEFI implementations up to speed. It feels wrong to purchase a brand new P55 motherboard today not knowing if it will be able to support future hard drive capacities. Keep in mind that this is all about booting from 2TB+ drives. If your boot drive is less than 2TB, you can still install virtually unlimited capacity in secondary system drives.
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an yet another reason to dump the whole x86 architecture and start from scratch...
typo on page 5, "this drive can reach up to 8GB maximum capacity with its four bays fully populated." should be 8TB
Would it not be prudent to at least mention Linux being able to support GPT without the actual need for EFI:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gpt/
Why would you want to boot from a system drive over 2 TB!?
So, this is start of new generation computers. Again I must backup all
software for old machines. What's about compatibility between BIOS and
UEFI? Will UEFI make more secure computers? Anyway,I am glad for this change, we will have better computers...
Not really. Windows XP is still the most widely used operating system after all this time, and it can't work with EFI/UEFI... thus, there hasn't really been a great incentive for hardware vendors to implement it. Besides which, I doubt people have been eagerly anticipating it in droves - not being able to create a bootable partition larger than 2TB is a drawback? The vast majority of users won't need a single bootable partition that large any time soon.
There's no denying that EFI/UEFI provides benefits, but from my point of view they're mostly future benefits... there's just not enough reason to implement it on a large scale right now. Perhaps a few years from today, when W7 is more widely adopted - sure, why not, as it doesn't hurt anything. At the moment? Can't see much justification for it personally, but hey ho - just my thoughts.
Wasn't there an article, in this same website (long before the overhaul), like this years ago?
It got me reading on bios openbios and other stuff but where was it?
I'll give it a few more years I agree with hohum83
apple have been using the efi bios since the introduction of the intel based mac line. i guess it was part of the deal they struck with intel at the time (as intel pioneered the efi solution). booting a mac is a very straight forward process when compared to the pc.
apple are very difficult to work out as they seem to use a lot of "standardised" options such as the linux base underneath os x, the efi boot system, they embraced guid partitions before windows did to name but a few, but then they build "proprietary" system on top of these technologies that they lock down and defend with their lives, so on the one hand they embraced open source ideas and standards, and on the other hand they defend their own i.p. rigorously..
one can only wonder what microsoft would be capable of if they gave in trying to "invent" everything themselves and embrace more open standards giving their huge programming teams more time to write innovative stuff instead of reinventing the wheel over and over so to speak..
MCA = Micro Channel Architecture, surely?