In Late 90‘s Microsoft’s intervention with Intel resulted in Universal Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI) the initial purpose of which was to boot securely.
#CENTOS 6 READ HFS FILE SYSTEM CODE#
BIOS holds the partitioning Information in an special area called Master Boot Record ( MBR) such that additional code gets stored in first sector of every boot-able partition. If I remember correctly, till late 90‘s BIOS which stands for Basic Input/ Output System was the only way to boot an Intel System. Another way to achieve the same goal is to use virtualization using Xen, QEMU, KVM or any other preferred visualization tool. Most of the boot-loaders of today are smart enough to recognize any number of Operating System on the same box and provide menu to boot into the preferred one. Many developers run both Windows and Linux on the same machine which may be a matter of preference or need. One of the most widely used Architecture, INTEL is undergoing some changes and it is important to understand these changes which on the other hand requires knowledge of boot process. One of the very first decision we comes across while installing a Linux Distribution is the partitioning of its disk, the file-system to use, implement encryption for security which varies with the change in architecture and platform. This article in an effort to fulfil this gap in the most easiest way possible. We comes across these terminology very often but rarely took the pain to know these and their meaning in details. The concept of boot loading, disk partitioning, partition table, BIOS, UEFI, File system types, etc.