UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) was developed by the UEFI Forum consortium based on specifications initially provided by Intel as a successor to the BIOS (although most UEFI firmware images provide legacy support for BIOS services).
UEFI provides support for modern equipment, modular architecture, CPU-independent architecture and drivers, network booting and secure boot.
UEFI is supported in current implementations of many operating systems, including FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and Windows