Of course, until the transition to UEFI is final, most platform firmware will continue to support legacy (BIOS) booting as well, in order to accommodate legacy-only operating systems. Nevertheless, UEFI has already caused a buzz among application developers, who should be clear about the applications that will require to be tweaked to run on UEFI-capable machines.

In this context, Bhandari opines that UEFI is only a BIOS/OS interface specification. It involves BIOS boot-time services that the OS does not consume, and runtime services that are used by the OS. Only the OS kernel and drivers can access the runtime services. So the OS loader is the only application that really needs to understand UEFI. Hence, if developers are writing an OS or a driver that uses features of UEFI, then they would have to learn the specifications. On the other hand, user-level applications cannot have that access and hence are most likely NOT to be impacted. In fact, as UEFI is compatible by design and evolutionary, implying that it abstracts BIOS from the OS and decouples development, most application developers can be completely abstracted by the changes at the UEFI level and will face minimal to no impact.

A different approach to computing
In fact, Vikram Gawande, tech lead, Zensar Technologies, feels that UEFI would possibly even simplify the task of application developers. "EFI would provide applications as well as the OS an advanced interface to access the hardware and other hardware specific services. So henceforth, OS and application developers wouldn't have to worry about the specifications of the underlying hardware - that would be taken care of by the EFI. Of course, in order to take advantage of this feature, existing applications running on the OS but accessing some hardware would have to use the interfaces provided by EFI," he observes.

Reflecting further on the impact of UEFI on application development, Gawande feels that hardware testing applications used in the mass production of PCs will be significantly affected once UEFI comes into mass operation. "Developers of current hardware testing applications designed to be run in the pre-OS environment would have to completely re-write their applications in ‘C' using data types provided by the EFI shell," he says.

He elucidates, "Besides, as a specification, EFI would provide a pre-OS execution environment, which would facilitate running an application without actually requiring the OS to be up-and-running. For example, if a user desires to listen to music on a laptop and no other task is to be performed, in an EFI executing environment, this could perhaps be done without actually running the OS. This feature is of particular use to PC manufacturers, since it would decrease the hardware testing time drastically."

Apparently, end users may also find it easier to use their PC. If that is the case, here's to a whole new way of booting!

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For more details, visit
www.uefi.org
www.intel.com/software