What are the princible differences between BIOS and UEFI

[Daniel~]

Other than the obvious interface differences and appearances, What are the main advantages of UEFI?
Thanks one and all!

 

[Daerandin]

For a home computer there really is no difference. There are a lot of technical improvement with UEFI as well as security to prevent booting of unknown kernels or even unknown bootloaders (Secure Boot), but this is again something which is kind of pointless for a home computer in my opinion.

I just remembered that there is one advantage that home users might have benefit of, if you care about that sort of thing: UEFI booting can use the GPU very early in the boot process, which allows for fancy high resolution logos to display during boot.

The advantages are (ripped directly from the Wikipedia article:

• Ability to boot from large disks (over 2 TB) with a GUID Partition Table (GPT)
• CPU-independent architecture
• CPU-independent drivers
• Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability
• Modular design
• Backward and forward compatibility

Most of this is something I suspect most home users don't really care about. Besides, after your system has booted, there is no difference. It's just the actual boot process that is different.

EDIT: Accidentally clicked on "Post reply" while editing formatting....

 

[Daniel~]

Thank you! It's always best to know! ":O}