14 Facts About UEFI

UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages over a traditional BIOS system:.

Unofficial UEFI support is under development for POWERPC64 by implementing TianoCore on top of OPAL, the OpenPOWER abstraction layer, running in little-endian mode.

UEFI requires the firmware and operating system loader to be size-matched; that is, a 64-bit UEFI firmware implementation can load only a 64-bit operating system boot loader or kernel and the same applies to 32-bit.

In that case, booting Linux on UEFI systems is the same as on legacy BIOS-based systems.

Beyond loading an OS, UEFI can run UEFI applications, which reside as files on the EFI System Partition.

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Type of UEFI application is an OS boot loader such as GRUB, rEFInd, Gummiboot, and Windows Boot Manager; which loads some OS files into memory and executes them.

For use on ESPs, UEFI defines a specific version of the FAT file system, which is maintained as part of the UEFI specification and independently from the original FAT specification, encompassing the FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12 file systems.

OS boot loaders can be automatically detected by UEFI, which enables easy booting from removable devices such as USB flash drives.

UEFI specification includes support for booting over network via the Preboot eXecution Environment .

Methods used for launching UEFI shell depend on the manufacturer and model of the system motherboard.

Extensions to UEFI can be loaded from virtually any non-volatile storage device attached to the computer.

UEFI Capsule defines a Firmware-to-OS firmware update interface, marketed as modern and secure.

In x86 systems, the UEFI firmware is usually stored in the NOR flash chip of the motherboard.

An implementation of the UEFI API was introduced into the Universal Boot Loader in 2017.