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Start using UEFI
UEFI usage and support is rapidly growing in computing today. Our goal is to enable product manufacturers to create products that are shipped both supporting and using UEFI to boot the operating system. If you are interested in the EDK II implementation of UEFI please see Getting Started with EDK II.
However, if you are a technology enthusiast, then you may want to try out UEFI yourself. You should note that UEFI is focused on improving the firmware to OS interface from a code developer standpoint, and you may not notice much difference as a user once the operating system has started.
This page discusses methods to potentially install a UEFI compatible operating system on your computer. This can potentially lead to the loss of the data on your computer's hard drive. Please only proceed if you do not have valuable data on your computer's hard drive.
Our community is generally developer focused. We don't provide general technical support for usage of UEFI products. If you need official support for your UEFI product, then you should seek technical support from the product manufacturer.
The first thing you will need in order to use UEFI is a compatible firmware.
You may have a UEFI compatible firmware in your motherboard. If your motherboard listed UEFI compatibility as a product feature, then this is good. If not, then you might still check the firmware (BIOS) setup, but your results may vary.
There are many possible ways that the motherboard product may enable UEFI support. Unfortunately, we can't document them all in this page. But, you might want to enter the firmware (BIOS) setup program for your product, and attempt to find a UEFI or EFI enabling question. Sometimes this can be found under the 'boot' menu of the firmware setup.
The OVMF project is part of our community tasks, and provides a UEFI compatible firmware for the QEMU and KVM virtual machine environments.
VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org) is a virtual machine environment. The more recent versions of VirtualBox can enable UEFI support in the VM settings under 'System' => 'Extended Features' => 'EFI support'.
Our community does not produce a UEFI compatible operating system. However, here we will list some operating systems which have some level of UEFI compatibility.
Ubuntu provides UEFI bootable CD images for their 64-bit (X64) releases.