F17-Alpha DVD basic install success with comments

[Peter Gueckel]

Adam Williamson wrote:

> 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.

Very informative! Thanks for taking the time.