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Intel Gives Further EFI Development to Industry Group.

Unified EFI Forum Formed

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/27/2005 | 04:21 PM ]

A number of technology companies have formed the Unified EFI Forum, Inc., a non-profit

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Washington corporation. The Forum will assume responsibility from Intel for the evolution and promotion of the EFI Specification, which will replace certain functions currently performed by BIOS and may speed up PC boot time and reliability.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) will be a specification detailing an interface that helps hand off control of the system for the pre-boot environment (i.e.: after the system is powered on, but before the operating system starts) to an operating system, such as Windows or Linux. UEFI will provide a “clean” interface between operating systems and platform firmware at boot time, and will support an architecture-independent mechanism for initializing add-in cards.

EFI is already supported by a number of 64-bit operating systems and platforms, and is an emerging interface for 32-bit operating systems. The inclusion of UEFI in operating systems and platforms will advance interoperability between platforms and add-in cards and pave the way for improvements in boot performance and robustness. The Forum will review the present EFI 1.10 Specification, which was developed by Intel Corp. for any required changes, and intends to publish the first Unified EFI specification by the end of 2005. The Forum will also make available test suites for the UEFI Specification based on contributions from member companies.

Currently the list of UEFI Forum participants includes AMD, American Megatrends, Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Insyde, Intel, Microsoft and Phoenix Technologies.

Interested parties are invited to participate in the activities of the Unified EFI Forum as either contributors or adopters. The promoters have agreed that licenses to any Promoter intellectual property required to implement the specification will be available on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.