Faster PC Boot Up Promised With BIOS Replacement

For twenty five years BIOS has been the software that has booted up PCs. But now it is expected to be replaced by a new technology known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), which promises much faster boot up times.

For most of us, BIOS (Basic Input/Ouput System) is the first thing we see when we switch on a computer. It initialises the machine so the operating system can get going. BIOS is hardwired into the PC as it is stored on a non-volatile ROM chip on the PC’s motherboard. The main function of BIOS is to load and start the operating system. It identifies all the system devices such as the video card, keyboard and mouse, hard disk, CD/DVD drive etc.

But BIOS is now showing its age. It is plagued by slow boot times (Windows Vista can take up to 30 seconds, unlike some of the new ‘instant-on’ tablets or laptops on the market). And its lack of flexibility is starting to limit future developments, because problems tend to occur when external devices are added to the system.

Design Limitations

This is because the core design of BIOS tries to operate in the same way it did with older machines. Essentially it expects the PC to have the same set-up as a 25 year-old machine. But things have changed dramatically. For example, modern PCs do not use AT or PS/2 ports any more for keyboards or the mouse. Instead they are typically connected by the USB port, but this has meant a workaround was needed, because BIOS only recognised USB drives and devices as a hard disk or floppy drive.

Another problem was the increasing hard disk sizes, as BIOS was only designed to work with drive sizes of up to two terabytes, which meant that it had a limited shelf life left to it.

So the need for UEFI is clear, and it will increasingly be used in new PCs from 2011. Indeed, it is already used in some machines, such as Dell R710 PowerEdge 2U rack-mount server and Lenovo’s rack-mount ThinkServer RD210.

UEFI is designed to be more flexible than its ancient predecessor and promises much faster boot up times, apparently just a few of seconds. The development of UEFI is been led by the UEFI Forum.

Ancient Technology

“Conventional BIOS is up there with some of the physical pieces of the chip set that have been kicking around the PC since 1979,” Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, told the BBC.

According to Doran, the creators of the original BIOS only expected it to have a lifetime of about 250,000 machines – a figure that has long been surpassed.

“They are as amazed as anyone else that now it is still alive and well in a lot of systems,” he told the BBC. “It was never really designed to be extensible over time.”

The good news is that UEFI is a lot more flexible, as it does not treat every USB-connected device as a hard drive, but instead just says that the computer will have a keyboard somewhere on the system.

“All it says is that somewhere in the machine there’s a device that can produce keyboard-type information,” said Mr Doran.

Flexible Architecture

This means that with UEFI, it will be much easier for user input to arrive via other input options, such as touchscreens, soft keyboards etc.

“The extensible part of the name is important because we are going to have to live with this for a long time,” said Doran.

And Doran thinks that 2011 will be the year that sales of UEFI machines start to dominate, as more motherboard makers switch from BIOS to UEFI.

“I would say we are at the edge of the tipping point right now,” he told the BBC.