efi and linux - bootloaders, and any performance advantage?

Question

Modern systems seem to be EFI based, and while there's a specific version of lilo that works with it, i can't seem to find any mention of a efi varient of grub (edit - on modern debian derivative systems there's grub-efi. Most references to it seem to be about various bugs in/for it tho) . In general, how well is EFI supported on linux?

In addition, apparently windows 7 uses EFI to enable faster boot - 12 seconds or so with some systems. While a properly tweaked linux system could probably come close, are there any enhancements to the linux booting procedure that take advantage of EFI?

Answer 1

EFI has worked with Linux for at least ~10 years or so. I've personally had to toggle some ACPI settings to get Linux to boot, but you should be able to find any caveats like that from your vendors documentation.

As you stated, grub-efi and elilo.efi are the main choices to boot Linux from EFI.

Furthermore, EFI is a replacement for the traditional BIOS. Vendors have different implementations of it, but typically you'll have more control from EFI and can run your own EFI applications from the EFI shell.