AMD64 (Opteron/Athlon) boards supporting EFI

[Vipul Deokar]

Hi folks,

I was wondering if there are any AMD64-based boards in the market by
the usual suspects (AMI, Phoenix, or other) that come with default or
other-wise EFI support. (EFI is an initiative by Intel-Microsoft
primarily and others to do away with the standard PC-AT style BIOS
firmware, for IA64 and new x86-32 based-boards). Also, recent Linux
bootloaders (elilo) and kernel have added support for EFI already.

Please let me know if such boards are available, and also if AMD is
participating in the EFI effort (I did not see anything on their
web-site) in any way.

Thanks.
Vipul

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I was wondering if there are any AMD64-based boards in the market by
the usual suspects (AMI, Phoenix, or other) that come with default or
other-wise EFI support. (EFI is an initiative by Intel-Microsoft
primarily and others to do away with the standard PC-AT style BIOS
firmware, for IA64 and new x86-32 based-boards). Also, recent Linux
bootloaders (elilo) and kernel have added support for EFI already.

Please let me know if such boards are available, and also if AMD is
participating in the EFI effort (I did not see anything on their
web-site) in any way.

I haven't heard of anything mentioned specifically yet for AMD platforms,
but neither is it a pressing priority. First of all, it's not an officially
recognized standard yet, nor a defacto standard for that matter. Second,
there seems to be some competition for it as a standard. There is a
Phoenix-Microsoft initiative called CSS (Core System Software) which is more
Windows-centric, a lot of things about it have to be run from Windows, which
Microsoft will more likely have a preference for. It's possible that they
are trying to get the two competing standards integrated, but I have no
information about that.

Anyways about your specific question, I'd say I wouldn't worry about it, the
day there is an agreed upon new standard available for the PC, that's when
AMI, Phoenix, and all of the other BIOS makers will have it available for
AMD platforms as well.

Yousuf Khan