TABLE OF CONTENTS Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
EFI provides a variety of functions that are used for drivers and applications to communication with the underlying EFI components. Many of the designs for interfaces have historically been short-sighted due to their inability to predict changes in technology. An example of such shortsightedness might be where a disk interface assumed that a disk might never have more than 8 gigabytes of space available. It is often hard to predict what changes technology might provide. Many famous statements have been made that fret about how a personal computer might never be practical, or assure readers that 640 kilobytes of memory would be more than anyone would ever need. With these poor past predictions in mind, one can attempt to learn from such mistakes and design interfaces that are robust enough for common practices today, and make the best attempt at predicting how one might use these interfaces years from today.
This chapter describes a selection of common interfaces that show up in EFI as well as the Framework:
Architectural Protocols: These are a set of protocols that abstract the platform hardware from the EFI drivers and applications. They are unusual only in that they are the protocols that are going to be used by the DXE Foundation and are the basis for a Framework-based implementation. These protocols in...
