Questions about the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that finally replaced the BIOS on newer desktops and laptops with the release of Windows 8. UEFI is independent from CPU architectures and supports booting via UEFI with and without secure boot enabled as well as legacy booting via CSM.
For questions about the Secure Boot feature read and use: secure-boot
About UEFI
UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages over a traditional BIOS system:
- Ability to boot from large disks (over 2 TiB) with a GUID Partition Table, GPT.
- CPU-independent architecture
- CPU-independent drivers
- Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability
- Modular design
Excerpt from Wikipedia article about UEFI
AdamW on UEFI boot: how does that actually work, then?
Known issues
- Some computers support legacy booting, but this feature is not available on all devices and planned to be phased out.
- Some UEFI firmware implementations from computer manufacturers only support booting through
\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFIfrom the EFI System Partition, not honoring commands to boot a certain UEFI NVRAM boot entry.
Noteable questions
http://askubuntu.com/q/233687/40581
Troubleshooting the following error GRUB messages when trying to boot Windows:
error: can't find command drivemap. error: invalid EFI file path
BIOS vs. UEFI
