UEFI: The Next-Generation Firmware with Advanced Features and Benefits

January 29, 2023

UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and is a newer firmware developed for more recent machines. It was created to overcome the limitations of BIOS and shorten system boot time. UEFI uses the GPT partitioning scheme and supports much greater drive sizes than BIOS. It runs in 32-bit or 64-bit mode, allowing it to provide a graphical user interface with mouse support.

UEFI also provides better security with the Secure Boot feature, preventing unauthorized apps from booting. However, the downside is that Secure Boot prevents dual booting because it treats other OSes as unsigned apps.

The EFI Shell is only one of the facets of EFI — alongside the boot manager, the partitioning scheme, and the firmware proper itself. The advantages of the EFI Shell are few to the ordinary end user. After all, ordinary end users don't maintain the machine.

The advantages of the EFI Shell are more for system administrators. The Shell comprises a pre-boot environment where a system adminstrator can do basic file, disc volume, and device manipulation tasks. Some of the earliest EFI utility programs for x86 were EFI versions of CHKDSK, FORMAT, and DISKPART. On more mature EFI platforms, the toolset now available is larger.

The UEFI interactive shell is a simple shell program responsible for booting your operating system. You can also use the UEFI interactive shell to run EFI shell commands and scripts. It can be used to update the System Firmware of your motherboard as well. Additionally, UEFI GOP allows the system to boot up faster, because the system can start up in the monitor's native resolution, and the hand-off of the graphics card from the pre-boot environment to the operating system is less involved and faster.

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