There's been a bit of noise recently about Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). People seem to be paying some attention that Apple appears to be adopting it for their Intel powered machines. Now, although many people seem to think that EFI is new, it's been around for nearly five years so far, but few people have paid any attention. That's going to change, as Longhorn/Vista is going to support EFI, as will MacOS.

There are advantages to EFI - it means that 20 years of accumulated cruft and poorly documented BIOS calls can be thrown out for a properly designed and documented set of calls for figuring things out. One downside is that an EFI system requires a special partition on the hard disk. It also changes the partitioning method, as EFI itself is in control of partitioning!

What views do you have on EFI? SJ and others have already posted their views here.