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In the UEFI Shell, the SmbiosView command can retrieve and display the SMBIOS data. [15] [16] One can often enter the UEFI shell by entering the system firmware settings, and then selecting the shell as a boot option (as opposed to a DVD drive or hard drive).
Open Firmware defines a standard way to describe the hardware configuration of a system, called the device tree. [3] This helps the operating system to better understand the configuration of the host computer, relying less on user configuration and hardware polling.
The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel–HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. BIOS limitations (such as 16-bit real mode, 1 MB addressable memory space, [7] assembly language programming, and PC AT hardware) had become too restrictive for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting. [8]
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
On Apple Mac computers using Intel x86-64 processor architecture, the EFI system partition is initially left blank and unused for booting into macOS. [13] [14]However, the EFI system partition is used as a staging area for firmware updates [15] and for the Microsoft Windows bootloader for Mac computers configured to boot into a Windows partition using Boot Camp.
By default, Mac will always boot from the last-used start-up disk. Holding down the option key (⌥) at startup brings up the boot manager, which allows the user to choose which operating system to start the device in.
An unlocked bootloader, showing additional available options. Bootloader unlocking is the process of disabling the bootloader security that makes secure boot possible. It can make advanced customizations possible, such as installing custom firmware.
coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, [5] is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit or 64-bit operating system.