It`s not guaranteed. (This may be specific to ASUS if tech support says so, but it`s usually not mandatory.) Then came 2020, and a brand new laptop appeared with only UEFI. No legacy boots of any kind (except on external USB drives). Months later, a new Xeon-based portable workstation found its way into our home, and again, this beast would only be UEFI. If you are a regular PC user, switching to a computer with UEFI is not a noticeable change. Your new computer boots up and shuts down faster than with a BIOS, and you can use drives that are 2.2 TB or larger. In November 2017, Intel announced that CSM support would be phased out by 2020. [55] Secure Boot is supported on Windows 8 and 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022, as well as Windows 11, VMware vSphere 6.5[64], and a number of Linux distributions, including Fedora (version 18 or later), openSUSE (version 12.3 or later), RHEL (version 7 or later), CentOS (version 7 or later[65]), Debian (version 10 or later), [66] and Ubuntu (since version 12.04.2). [67] FreeBSD support is planned to begin in January 2017. [68] In October 2018, Arm announced Arm ServerReady, a conformance certification program for installing generic standard operating systems and hypervisors on Arm servers. The program requires the system firmware to comply with the basic server boot requirements (SBBR). SBBR requires UEFI, ACPI and SMBIOS compliance. In October 2020, Arm announced the expansion of the program to the edge and IoT market.
The new name of the program is Arm SystemReady. Arm SystemReady has defined the Base Boot Requirements (BBR) specification, which currently provides three recipes, two of which are for UEFI: 1) SBBR: Requires UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS compliance suitable for enterprise operating environments such as Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and VMware ESXi; and 2) EBBR: requires compliance with a set of UEFI interfaces, as defined in the Embedded Base Boot Requirements (EBBR), adapted to embedded environments such as Yocto. Many Linux and BSD distributions can support both recipes. UEFI Capsule defines an interface for updating firmware from firmware to the operating system marketed as modern and secure. [80] Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10,[81] and Fwupd for Linux all support the UEFI capsule. In Windows, wininit.exe is loaded with other processes such as services.exe for service control, lsass.exe for local security and authority (similar to execution levels), and lsm.exe for local session management. In January 2013, a bug around the UEFI implementation was released on some Samsung laptops that made them masonry in UEFI mode after installing a Linux distribution. While potential conflicts with a kernel module designed to access system functions on Samsung laptops were initially blamed (which also led kernel maintainers to disable the module on UEFI systems as a security measure), Matthew Garrett discovered that the bug was actually triggered by storing too many UEFI variables in memory. and that the bug was also triggered on Windows under certain conditions. This is the first time we were able to Finally, he found that the faulty kernel module had caused kernel message dumps to be written into the firmware, triggering the error.
[45] [157] [158] Now, Intel has at least announced several times that they will no longer support BIOS mode (not even BIOS compatibility mode in UEFI), so there are already new PCs that don`t actually have this option anymore – they only support booting into native UEFI mode. The AMI customer portal for security alerts and other announcements. If you need help with access issues, please contact your AMI sales representative using the form at the bottom of this webpage. In 2007, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and PC manufacturers agreed on a new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification. This is an industry-wide standard maintained by the Unified Extended Firmware Interface Forum, not just controlled by Intel. UEFI support was introduced with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7. The vast majority of computers you can buy today now use UEFI instead of a traditional BIOS. Although all modern computers come with UEFI by default, some reasons why you may choose BIOS over UEFI are: From the above, you can see that there are only two partitions. The first partition is a small partition of 1 GiB, formatted as ext4 and containing the kernels. The second partition is another beast and uses LVM. Even though I was happy with LVM on my Linux systems, I`m not going to touch it right now.
Extensions for UEFI can be loaded from virtually any non-volatile storage device connected to the computer. For example, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) may distribute systems with an EFI system partition on the hard disk, adding additional functionality to the standard UEFI firmware stored on the motherboard ROM. AMIUCP is a utility used to preconfigure the Aptio Flash Utility (AFU). Users can insert and exchange the default command string and ROM image used in AFU to create a customized version of the utility.