Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Specifies How Pre-Boot Environment Hands Off To An OS Loader
Portland, Oregon – The Unified EFI Forum, Inc., a non-profit Washington Corporation, has approved its first specification for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. The new specification, named UEFI 2.0, supplants the EFI 1.10 specification originally published by Intel Corporation. EFI is already supported by a number of operating systems and platforms, and UEFI is now expected to emerge as the pre-boot interface for nextgeneration operating systems.
The specification provides an unambiguous, 32/64-bit, testable interface between a platform and an operating system. It increases boot-time robustness with a replicated on-disk boot format, while providing for add-in card initialization unconstrained by real-mode address space. “The product of intense technical work over the last nine months, the UEFI 2.0 specification represents outstanding industry teamwork from our member companies,” said Tony Pierce, President of UEFI, Inc.
Interested parties are invited to participate in the activities of the Unified EFI Forum as either Contributors or Adopters. Future work includes test development and the development of specifications aimed at interoperable firmware support for new silicon. The new specification and more information for prospective participants are available at http://www.uefi.org.
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