Industry Firmware Website www.UEFI.org | Products Specifications Founded 2005 | |
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Key people Mark Doran, Dong Wei, Michael Rothman, Vincent Zimmer Headquarters Beaverton, Oregon, United States Type of business Collaborative trade organization Profiles | ||
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum or UEFI Forum is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from twelve "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies.
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Overview
The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI version(s) were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS.
In addition to the UEFI specification, the forum is responsible for a Platform Initialization (PI) specification, which addresses the firmware internal architecture as well as firmware-to-hardware interfaces. The forum also is responsible for Self-Certification Test suites, which defines conformance to the specifications that it defines.
In October 2013, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) assets have also been transferred into the forum. The forum is responsible for the management and promotion of future ACPI specifications, which provides static tables at boot time and dynamic control methods as the primary runtime interfaces between the OS and system firmware for system configuration, power management and RAS (Reliability, Availability and Supportability) features. ACPI "Revision 5.0" is used as the starting point from which future ACPI version(s) will be developed.