Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds

Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds
BBC News - Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds

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TheSuperRuski

DoubleD wrote: »

Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds
BBC News - Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds

Yea i had to study this to pass a my APS - HP Desktops, Workstations and Notebooks 2010 test. HP was heavy on making you learn and understand it. Not my strong point, Maybe i should have read that article before i took the test. I passed it at least.

Good post, Now i can actually explain it without tripping over my words.

erpadmin

Ummm....wow!

Looks like many of us will have to retake A+ again. LOL.

Very good article by the way. + Rep.

tiersten

Ehh. The article isn't quite as it appears. It seems to imply that the same crusty old piece of BIOS code has been in every PC since the first PC which isn't true.

Throwing away the existing PC BIOS and replacing it with a UEFI one is an important step for several reasons but it isn't purely just to make it boot faster and it doesn't mean you can just do a straight swap from PC BIOS to UEFI either.

Most of the delay when booting is due to the time needed to probe the various buses like PATA/SATA and USB. You can defer it but you then run into the other issue which is that every mainstream OS currently expects this detection to have already occurred and that all the devices are ready. If you start up too fast then sometimes a device like a HD won't actually be ready to be talked to and your boot will fail.

Your OS needs to understand about UEFI to be able to be booted by it. Initialisation which was done by the PC BIOS won't have been done in UEFI. You can insert a PC BIOS emulation module into a UEFI firmware which will allow you to boot any OS but then you get all the drawbacks again.

The major reason for the PC BIOS to be upgraded or replaced is that the PC partition table format is only capable of handling drives up to 2TB in size. You need GPT support in your firmware (which UEFI does) to be able to boot from a drive that is > 2TB in size.

In short, the PC BIOS does need to be upgraded/replaced but it will require support from the OS to do so and the speed gains are due to deferring some tasks to the OS along with removing some legacy code. Macs have had UEFI firmware for years now and Boot Camp uses a special PC BIOS emulation module to allow you to boot Windows. Some PCs have had UEFI firmware with a PC BIOS emulation module as well for quite a whole. Look at InsydeH2O as they make one of the more popular UEFI firmwares.