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The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introductionThe Extensible Firmware Interface - an introductionPosted Aug 14, 2011 21:48 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)Parent article: The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction
So is EFI just bootstrap software? If so, it deserves a better comparison to BIOS, because starting up the computer is just a small part of the BIOS concept. What BIOS is about is providing a hardware abstraction layer, so CP/M could write to a disk drive of a model the authors of CP/M had never heard of. That aspect of BIOS was obsoleted by microprocessors getting cheap enough that we could put one in every peripheral device. Now the hardware abstraction layer is in the peripherals. One thing is clear: EFI needs a better name - a descriptive one. Extensible Firmware Interface sounds like a patent title. "Firmware" isn't a set of function - it's just an implementation technology.
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The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction Posted Aug 15, 2011 9:21 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
> One thing is clear: EFI needs a better name - a descriptive one. Extensible Firmware Interface sounds like a patent title. "Firmware" isn't a set of function - it's just an implementation technology.
In theory "EFI" is just the interface. Its implementations are abusively called EFI as well. That's not unusual.
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