Home » UEFI Learning Center

Learning Center

The following are resources from past events and technical sessions.

UEFI Today: Bootstrapping the Continuum

The Intel Technology Journal, Volume 15, Issue 1 issue is completely focused on UEFI and the impact the technology has had on platform engineering. The content architects for this edition are Vincent Zimmer and Michael Rothman. From its roots in 1997 to support Intel® Itanium® based servers and the first published Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification around 2000, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) has now eclipsed legacy BIOS across all computing platforms from high performance servers to mobile devices to deeply embedded devices. The success of UEFI would not have been possible without industry support of the open source implementation and industry-guided platform firmware specification. UEFI as an open standard specification ensured that it received broad support and investment from across the industry to evolve as required to support technology changes in our industry, for example boot time requirements and an ever-increasing focus on security.

Download the PDF of the Entire Issue here.

Table of Contents

Quick Boot: A Guide for Embedded Firmware Developers, by Pete Dice

UEFI Plugfest October 24-27, 2011

Plugfest Introduction - Aven Chuang (Insyde Software Corp.)

UEFI Forum Updates - Dong Wei, VP of the UEFI Forum (HP)

Best Practices for UEFI Driver Compatibility - Stefano Righi (AMI)

Understanding Platform Requirements for UEFI HII - Brian Richardson (Intel)

UEFI Security Enhancements - Kevin Davis (Insyde Software) 

How to Protect the Pre-OS Environment with UEFI - Tony Mangefeste (Microsoft)

Pre-OS Display Switching with UEFI GOP - James Huang (AMD)

Debug Methodology Under UEFI - Jack Wang (Phoenix Technologies)

UEFI Plugfest July 6-9, 2011

The July 2011 Plugfest at Microsoft in Redmond Washington was a well attended, energetic and successful event.  To see some highlights and hear the impressions of the attendees of this event, watch the video: July 2011 Plugfest Video

UEFI Plugfest Lab Package

UEFI Ecosystem - Mark Doran (Intel) President UEFI Forum
Presented on July 6, 2011
The current state of UEFI in the ecosystem, including: historical data, specification status, resources availability, and the general adoption process within the ecosystem.

UEFI Secure Boot - Jeff Bobzin (Insyde Software) Secretary UEFI Forum
Presented on July 6, 2011
Utilizing the UEFI Specification 2.3.1 security features (secure boot). Interest in specification features and implementation based upon the specification.

UEFI SCT - Dong Wei (HP) Vice President UEFI Forum and Harry Husing (Intel) Member UEFI Forum
Presented on July 6, 2011
Report on the general status and plans for the UEFI Self Certification Tests (SCTs).   A technical presentation focused on the philosophy and use of the SCT for UEFI compliance testing.

Replacing VGA, GOP Implementation for UEFI - Paul Blinzer (AMD) AMD Fellow
Presented on July 7, 2011
The Graphics Output Protocol (GOP) provides the support for Graphic console output in the UEFI Pre-boot environment.  This report explains GOP, the advantages of GOP and how it works.

Hardware Prototyping Using a Windows-Hosted UEFI Environment - Tim Lewis (Phoenix Technologies) UEFI Board Member
Presented on July 7, 2011
Challenges and solutions to developing and debugging in the UEFI environment.   Includes dicussions of using Windows Hosted debugging environments to develop and debug in the UEFI pre-boot environment.

Best Practices for UEFI Driver & Option ROM Developers - Brian Richardson (AMI) Member UEFI Industry Communications Work Group
Presented on July 8, 2011
An overview of Option ROMS.  How UEFI drivers function as Option ROMS, and best practices in developing drivers for Option ROM the environment.

UEFI Drive Partition Limits Fact Sheet

A fact sheet describing the limitation of Master Boot Record (MBR) Partition on systems with disk drives of greater than 2.2 Terabyte capacity, and the UEFI solution for this limitation.

A Tale of Two Standards Article

An article examining two technologies and comparing the evolutions of the boot firmware technology and the networking solutions.

Learn more about the upcoming book from Intel Press and download technical articles

Beyond BIOS 2nd Edition
Developing with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
By Vincent Zimmer, Michael Rothman, and Suresh Marisetty

Harnessing the UEFI Shell
Moving the platform beyond DOS
By Michael Rothman, Tim Lewis, Vincent Zimmer and Robert Hale

UEFI Plugfest June 22 - 24, 2010

UEFI Plugfest September 24-28, 2007

Session presentations include:

  • Phoenix Session: BIOS on UEFI - What they never taught you in UEFI 101
  • Intel Session: UEFI 2.1 and UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) 1.0 Details and Differences
  • AMD Session: AMD Common Silicon Firmware Module (ACSFM)
  • Microsoft Session: Microsoft and UEFI

UEFI Plugfest June 11-15, 2007

Other Documents for reference: