The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum (UEFI) today announced it has released the UEFI Specification, Version 2.8, which reflects many recent and useful technology changes in the platform firmware including added support for Representational State Transfer (REST) and memory cryptography. The upgraded industry standard benefits both the enterprise and consumer end-user by supporting a more secure system and faster boot times, speed of innovation, and quicker time-to-market across multiple interfaces.
The new specification adds support for REST. REST is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. RESTful Web services provide interoperability between computer systems on the internet.
In Version 2.8, the UEFI standard also includes added support for memory cryptography. This comes in the form of a UEFI memory map that counts memory ranges that can be protected using CPU memory cryptographic capabilities like encryption.
“The added support for both REST and memory cryptography, as well as the many other upgrades reflected in Version 2.8 will be a big advantage to anyone who is writing system firmware for embedded system to servers. These could be original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs),” said Mark Doran, president of The UEFI Forum. “The UEFI standards enable extensibility, modularity, and easy prototyping during development. UEFI specifications promote more efficient development because they allow developers to reuse code during the building process. It’s a win for everyone using it.”
The UEFI specifications define a new model for the interface between PC operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications.
The UEFI Forum promotes the implementation of UEFI specifications by BIOS vendors, operating system vendors and add-in card vendors.
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Find out more details about the UEFI Specification, Version 2.8.