It is an interface that takes care of handing over the pre-boot environment to the operating system.
UEFI is designed to be much more flexible than the old PC BIOS that dates back to some of the first IBM PC’s since 1979. The BIOS has not changed much in the past 25 years and is one of the main reasons why a PC’s boot-up time is over 25 seconds.
The original EFI specification was developed by Intel but has now evolved into a standard which is now known as UEFI. The UEFI forum, which is a non-profit corporation, is responsible for the management and promotion of the specification. Their goal is to replace the 25 year old BIOS that’s responsible for slow boot-ups.
Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, is quoted as saying: "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds. In terms of boot speed, we're not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional BIOS can manage, and we're getting closer to that every day."
Some PC manufactures have already started using UEFI and system administrators who oversee thousands of PC and servers have already seen the benefits of swapping old-fashioned Bios for UEFI.
The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel-HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. PC BIOS limitations (16-bit processor mode, 1 MB addressable space, PC AT hardware dependencies, etc.) were seen as clearly unacceptable for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting. The effort to address these concerns was initially called Intel Boot Initiative and was later renamed to EFI.
In July 25, 2005, the UEFI Forum was created, and is now responsible for EFI development and promotion.
Version 2.1 of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specification was released on January 7, 2007. As of March 2007, it added cryptography, network authentication, and theUser Interface Architecture (Human Interface Infrastructure in UEFI).
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