UEFI vs BIOS

[Steve R.]

This has been a well covered topic, but I liked this article. Worth sharing.

UEFI vs BIOS: What is the difference between BIOS and UEFI?

Is UEFI better or should you use BIOS? We explain the difference between BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) & UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in depth.

www.thewindowsclub.com

Since I'm using Linux, using the GUID Partition Table makes configuring your hard drive simpler. Since posting, I ran across this new article:

How to Enter UEFI on Windows 11 Systems

You can Enter UEFI on Windows 11 systems using any of these methods. The process is simple and it will hardly take a minute.

wccftech.com

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Having worked on some UEFI machines with the Navy, I can tell you I really liked dealing with them. The machines for which I was the administrator were Itanium-based. That is the Intel "Longhorn" model, a 64-bit box that had some pretty advanced options include both "traditional" and IEEE math instructions - which meant that I had 32-bit, two flavors of 64-bit, and even 128-bit math available. The "personnel" side of the apps on that box didn't care, but some statistical things we were doing at the time liked the really long precision. Typically, machines with UEFI will be the newer CPU models so will have other niceties built in.

The article mentions a few really nice features including a nicer user interface when doing system hardware reconfiguration (and testing!). One of those features is that UEFI can work via a networked interface. Since I was monitoring machines in New Orleans AND in San Diego, I could run system patch operations and forced reboots from our Navy "Inside" Intranet. (The "Outside" was the INTERnet.) We could down load low-level files to even patch the EFI-level drivers! I had to be physically present during the original installation of the systems, but once it was all connected to our inside network, EVERYTHING could be done remotely.

This particular UEFI also allowed us to dynamically configure disk RAID configurations, which was really convenient when we changed our Network Attached Storage (NAS) hardware (to expand to a model that allowed more disks. We were up to disk farms that were over 2.5 TB in capacity for the unclassified server farm AND over 1.5 TB for the classified servers. And it was growing when I retired, too.