Whither EFI

[mathematician]

It can safely be assumed that a few years from now GPT partition table will be standard, and the partition table in the MBR will not be of much more than antquarian interest. But can the same be said for EFI? On the face of it, nobody is going to start manufacturing EFI based PCs when the operating systems which are in widespread use expect to find a BIOS during the boot up process. On the other hand, nobody is going to start writing EFI operating systems until their are at least a large minority of PCs they can run on.

What is more, neither the hardware manufacturers, nor the software vendors, are likely to have Joe Public rising up as one, and demanding that the next PC he buys be EFI equipped. Apart from anything else, he has probably never even heard of it.

Am I missing something?

[bewing]

As I've said before, I think that GPT and EFI were vast mistakes -- there was never anything hard about extending the MBR to achieve the capabilities of GPT (with much less wasted disk space), and EFI is massive overkill (way too complex for its actual function). Sadly, I expect that GPT is inevitable. I still hope and expect that EFI will die a horrifying and painful death. The reason being: there are several very profitable companies with a niche market in creating custom black-box BIOSes. There is no money in creating EFIs, I don't believe. Therefore, BIOS companies have leverage and a vested interest to make sure that computers continue to use a BIOS/GPT based system in the future. But there is nothing to be done, except to wait and see what happens.

[mathematician]

I suspect EFI is going to be another OS/2. At one time OS/2 was going to be the successor of MS-DOS. The only trouble being that nobody wanted it.

[Brendan]

Hi,

It can safely be assumed that a few years from now GPT partition table will be standard, and the partition table in the MBR will not be of much more than antquarian interest. But can the same be said for EFI? On the face of it, nobody is going to start manufacturing EFI based PCs when the operating systems which are in widespread use expect to find a BIOS during the boot up process. On the other hand, nobody is going to start writing EFI operating systems until their are at least a large minority of PCs they can run on.

I can't think of any mainstream OSs that doesn't already support EFI (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X, etc). The only exception here is Windows...

Microsoft have stated that no 32-bit version of Windows will ever support EFI (but I don't know why anyone would want to use a 32-bit OSs on new hardware). Vista didn't officially support EFI (but from what I've heard there was a version of "Vista for EFI", that Microsoft put together so that firmware writers could test their implementation of EFI). There's also versions of Windows for Itanium that do use EFI.

The real question is will "Windows 7" support EFI?". The answer is probably "Yes" - Microsoft's own web site already has instructions for setting up Windows on a 64-bit 80x86 machine.

Once Microsoft does support EFI, how long will the crappy (and expensive, for motherboard manufacturers) legacy BIOS last?


Cheers,

Brendan

[Love4Boobies]

I'd like to add something to Brendan's post. Yes, Mac OS X and other OSes do have support for EFI, but so does Windows. Don't forget the Itanium-based systems have EFI firmware and Windows (Server?) does run on Itanium.

[Owen]

Another point: One of the biggest EFI firmware vendors is American Megatrends.

So the legacy BIOS companies are already well prepared :p