ARM joins UEFI Forum

UK: ARM has joined the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Forum. The UEFI Forum is a non-profit collaborative trade organization formed as an industry-wide effort to modernize the boot process.

The purpose of the Forum is to develop, manage and promote the UEFI specification, which, as an evolving specification, is driven by contributions and support from member companies.

The UEFI specification details an interface that helps hand off control of the system from the pre-boot environment (i.e., after the system is powered on, but before the operating system starts) to an operating system. UEFI will provide a clean interface between operating systems and platform firmware at boot time, and will support an architecture-independent mechanism for initializing add-in cards.

ARM has joined UEFI in order to support OEMs that are developing ARM processor-based solutions using UEFI, standardize the boot procedure for ARM processor-based platforms, improve the hardware-software interface for operating systems that target the ARM architecture  and to provide guidance to the UEFI ARM initiative.