The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 11, 2011 17:17 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
In reply to: The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction by jhhaller
Parent article: The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

I don't think the driver model does parallelism :) It's written using polled IO and is only supposed to be used for as long as you're explicitly driving some device.

FWIW, I'm a huge fan of things like EFI. And layers aren't a problem if you don't have to care about the layer beneath. For example, on ARM systems, we are increasingly booting using EFI (a good thing) and sometimes even doing so in convoluted ways (x-loader->u-boot->tianocore) but it doesn't matter because the time taken to do these steps is minimal overall. I'm far more worried about layers of complexity being added in the desktop than in EFI, which is at least a cross-vendor, cross-platform standard we can all use.

Jon.

The Extensible Firmware Interface - an introduction

Posted Aug 11, 2011 23:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Of course, you don't have to care about the layers underneath as long as they are bug-free and do what you want.

I'm sure that in future articles Matthew will assure us that EFI implementations are bug-free flawless jewels of perfect software engineering which work brilliantly on all operating systems, just as we would expect from the geniuses and wizards who work on BIOSes. (It's true: they do, as long as the set of operating systems consists of one single version of Windows on one single hardware configuration and it was only booted once during testing while holding a horseshoe and a rabbit's foot above the monitor.)