Ubios: China's Alternative to UEFI
18 comments
·October 23, 2025kasabali
> UEFI provides advantages including faster boot times through parallel hardware initialization
My older BIOS motherboards boot far quicker than "modern" UEFI ones.
fyrn_
This article feels super AI written. It explains what a virtual bus is like like 6 times in different ways
hackandthink
"UBIOS will be further discussed and revealed by the Global Computing Consortium at the 2025 Global Computing Conference in Shenzhen this November. For a country looking to both bolster its own domestic computing ecosystem and step away from American systems that constrict non-standard hardware implementations, the development of UBIOS may prove to be a major win for China. However, whether UBIOS becomes widely adopted and championed like the open standard RISC-V, or widely abandoned like LoongArch, remains to be seen."
cheschire
It doesn’t need to be widely adopted. Sometimes countries intentionally maintain different standards.
As an example:
caherrerapa
6 months later, researchers found that this was sending data back home and had hardcoded security keys
_blk
But can it also run a full IP stack? [Rhetorical]
ramshanker
More competetion always welcome.
Few weeks back they had HDMI/DisplayPort alternate standardized as well.
znpy
I’d honestly would like to read bcantrill’s opinion on this
wmf
I'm not Bryan but this sounds like the same over-abstracted architecture astronaut approach as UEFI. It's the compete opposite of Oxide's firmware.
bcantrill
Bingo: forcing UEFI and D-Bus to breed in captivity is antithetical to our approach of holistic boot.[0][1]
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0241
[1] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
ryao
Getting rid of the BIOS sounds awesome. I assume that means that it gets rid of code running the SMM, which can prevent invisible code from sapping performance from the machine for no apparent reason. For example, on recent AMD machines, such as my Zen 3 machine, memory bandwidth measured by ZFS' checksum algorithms will randomly drop by a significant percentage and there is no obvious reason why, although I suspect patrol scrubs are involved.
That begs the question. What does the patrol scrubs of ECC memory on your hardware?
BobbyTables2
This seems utterly bizarre.
It’s one thing to make a new firmware for PCs…
But they really don’t care about Linux or Windows? Or do they expect each to cave and support their thing because they make the world’s crap?
They simply could have written their own UEFI implementation if they so desired…
This feels more like a flex to the rest of the world than anything useful.
hulitu
> But they really don’t care about Linux or Windows?
They are both US products, subject to export controls.
BobbyTables2
You mean the thing started by a Swedish guy living in Finland?
estimator7292
Linux is not a "US product" what the hell are you even talking about?
hulitu
> Technical Maturity: The UEFI Forum updated all three of its core specifications (ACPI, UEFI, and PI) as recently as December 2024.
Updates are not a sign of technical maturity. You don't change the door to your house every year.
estimator7292
Where have you been for the last decade? These days if a project isn't updated at least biweekly it's considered abandoned rotting garbage
> As the United States has cut China off from advanced semiconductor technology, tightened controls on Chinese investments in U.S. firms, and scrutinized the flow of Chinese students and scholars to American universities, Beijing has stressed the need for indigenous innovation and to seize control of core technologies.
Sounds pretty self-defeating.