Below there is a list of things that I myself think of as advantages of UEFI over legacy BIOS:
1) Full support of GPT (advantages of which over MBR is another story)
2) UEFI partition is "visible" - by that I mean that unlike legacy MBR partition scheme, where booting information hidden inside special MBR record - UEFI partition is FAT (FAT32 mostly) partition with special mark. But still, its a regular partition that you're able to access directly from most of modern operating systems.
3) UEFI shell - when something does not boot right you can check things from primitive yet sufficient shell that is built-in most of the modern motherboard's firmware (most useful commands are: map, ls, cd and of-course changing file system (e.g. FS0:) and name of EFI executable to load).
4) Access to UEFI from running operating system - for instance you can:
- reboot PC and request start of another OS (use efibootmgr command to see list of available options):
> efibootmgr -n 0001; sync; systemctl reboot
- reboot PC and go to UEFI settings without pressing DEL or F2 or etc:
> systemctl reboot --firmware-setup
- see boot time without manual timer:
> systemd-analyze plot > "/tmp/plot.svg"; xdg-open "/tmp/plot.svg"
when starting from UEFI there will be a motherboard boot time given
5) Motherboard logo can be preserved while booting operating system (works for Linux) - this is rather personal preference.
Not whole list of advantages probably, but it's all that was important to me.
1) Full support of GPT (advantages of which over MBR is another story)
2) UEFI partition is "visible" - by that I mean that unlike legacy MBR partition scheme, where booting information hidden inside special MBR record - UEFI partition is FAT (FAT32 mostly) partition with special mark. But still, its a regular partition that you're able to access directly from most of modern operating systems.
3) UEFI shell - when something does not boot right you can check things from primitive yet sufficient shell that is built-in most of the modern motherboard's firmware (most useful commands are: map, ls, cd and of-course changing file system (e.g. FS0:) and name of EFI executable to load).
4) Access to UEFI from running operating system - for instance you can:
- reboot PC and request start of another OS (use efibootmgr command to see list of available options):
> efibootmgr -n 0001; sync; systemctl reboot
- reboot PC and go to UEFI settings without pressing DEL or F2 or etc:
> systemctl reboot --firmware-setup
- see boot time without manual timer:
> systemd-analyze plot > "/tmp/plot.svg"; xdg-open "/tmp/plot.svg"
when starting from UEFI there will be a motherboard boot time given
5) Motherboard logo can be preserved while booting operating system (works for Linux) - this is rather personal preference.
Not whole list of advantages probably, but it's all that was important to me.
