A PCMech reader writes:

There’s a lot of noise and little clarity on just WHAT the "Secure Boot" portion of UEFI will mean if Microsoft insists that in order to get ‘Windows 8 Certification’ on a Motherboard or a PC (ie: Dell) Mobo makers and PC makers will be pressured to enable Secure Boot in a way that could end up restricting a buyer from adding a dual boot or possibly re-using/re-purposing a PC with a different installed OS

UEFI is the next generation after BIOS and is already being used by certain computer OEMs such as Apple.

Is getting a multi-boot with Windows + Linux a doable thing? Yes, but it requires a rather deep understanding of how UEFI works.

The best write-up I’ve found concerning UEFI, multi-boot and Linux is the Arch Linux wiki entry, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. It is a very long read, but it has to be just to explain how this whole UEFI thing works.

Concerning multi-booting, that wiki entry states:

Since each OS or vendor can maintain its own files within the EFI SYSTEM PARTITION without affecting the other, multi-booting using UEFI is just a matter of launching a different UEFI application corresponding to the particular OS’s bootloader. This removes the need for relying on chainloading mechanisms of one bootloader to load another to switch OSes.

In a nutshell, UEFI adds in another "layer", so to speak, so that different OSes can boot more independently of each other.

In a Windows + Linux boot setup, the old multi-boot way (which is the current way for most people) is to use a bootloader like GRUB or LILO; this has to be there because the boot code area is only 440 bytes, so the addition of a boot loader is mandatory just to be able to choose which OS you want on startup; this is called a chainloading mechanism as mentioned in the quote above.

With the UEFI way, there is a "partition above the partition" (as in the EFI system partition) where the OS on startup can be chosen that way instead of relying on a bootloader. UEFI essentially treats different OSes defined in its system partition as different apps as far as I know, and you just choose which you want on startup.

Will Linux run on a PC with UEFI?

Yes, but the OEM question goes like this: "If I have a PC that has UEFI custom to the OEM, will Linux run on that (e.g. a Dell-branded PC with Windows 8)?"

My answer? I honestly don’t know, and it’s pretty much true none of us will know until OEM Windows 8 PCs start shipping with UEFI on board. The Linux community only knows the answers concerning questions on hardware for what it has access to. Right now the Win8 PCs with UEFI don’t exist yet, but they will soon enough. When they do, oh yes, the Linux community forums will start flooding up with information on whether OEM boxes such as from Dell with "secure boot" can be repurposed to run Linux or not, whether standalone or multi-boot.

Windows 8 is reported to ship in October 2012, so we should see new Win8 PCs well before the end of this year.

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