EFI - The BIOS Replacement

There are a number of problems with today's BIOSes, for starters, there's  no pre-boot support for drivers, formatting utilities, etc... If you want to  flash your BIOS you're stuck with booting to a DOS boot disk, but once in the  DOS shell there's very little you can do. You won't be able to find drivers  for a wireless networking card in DOS, so you're basically stuck with pulling  data off of a floppy or a CD, assuming you've installed the appropriate ATAPI  drivers.

What this all boils down to is that today's Basic Input/Output Systems (BIOSes)  are entirely too basic for the demands of users today. Imagine being  able to flash your BIOS without having to copy your BIOS to a floppy or use  a flaky Windows utility;  imagine a BIOS with a driver model so you could get  network access before ever having to boot into your OS, and imagine a BIOS  where you've got a fully functional shell where you can perform basic operations  on your drive (partitioning, formatting, etc...) without having to use DOS.

Solving the problems associated with today's antiquated BIOS architecture  is a technology that's been around for a while known as the Extensible Firmware  Interface (EFI).

Simply referred to as the thing "beyond BIOS," EFI promises to address all  of the issues we brought up and more. The EFI specification calls for a driver  model and has support for a shell. Not only would EFI enabled systems help  rid us all of DOS boot disks, but it would also be the final nail in the floppy  drive's coffin - with no need for DOS boot disks, the only purpose for the  floppy these days ends up disappearing.

 

An EFI Shell - Note the driver support that's displayed on the screen

For those of you that are worried about a lot of drivers making firmware hubs  entirely too large in size, you'll be able to have drivers on a USB flash disk  in order to reduce the amount of drivers that have to be present in the actual  firmware itself.

 

An EFI Boot Manager

EFI technology has already been deployed in Itanium systems, but unfortunately  we won't see it on the desktop for a while. What's necessary for EFI to be  implemented in desktops is a desktop OS with support for the standard. Microsoft  has yet to commit to releasing an OS with EFI support, although we can expect  support in Longhorn.