F17-Alpha DVD basic install success with comments

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-03-26 at 18:09 -0600, Peter Gueckel wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > Could you try one?
> 
> I have to pay when I go over my monthly GB download limit.
> 
> > [EFI]'s a system firmware level thing.
> 
> That's what I thought, but, having googled it numerous times, it seems to be 
> quite mysterious, still, and straight answers are hard to come by.

At the user level it's pretty simple: it's a modern replacement for
BIOS. It's an entirely new system firmware standard for PCs.

The most user-noticeable features of UEFI are probably secure boot
(which has been discussed ad infinitum: the important thing here is not
to confuse UEFI *as a whole* with the secure boot feature, which is one
small feature of UEFI and can be optional, as it is on all current
implementations. Some don't even have secure boot. The press often makes
this mistake) and the EFI boot manager, which puts the boot manager in
the system firmware where it belongs. No more faffing around with an MBR
bootloader for every disk and possible chainloading of bootloaders in
root partitions. With UEFI, broadly, OSes install somewhere and then
tell the system firmware where they are, and the system firmware gives
you the list of OSes to choose from.

Many new systems and motherboards have a UEFI-based firmware, now. But
because many OSes don't really support UEFI, UEFI implementations almost
always have a BIOS compatibility mode (sometimes referred to as CSM) and
almost always actually default to using it; you have to do something
specific to boot anything EFI natively. (Laptops with pre-installed OSes
can be an exception to this, there are a few which boot Windows x64
natively via EFI, I believe).

I tend to use 'EFI' and 'UEFI' interchangeably (see above!), which is a
bad habit. EFI originated as an Intel thing, at which time it was called
EFI. It then got proposed as an industry standard, accepted, and
somewhat revised, since when it's known as UEFI. Strictly, saying EFI
should really refer to the original Intel implementation only.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net