Does that mean I will have more choice in which surveillance agency I want to be spied by?
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Maybe not, if Intel goes tits-up
Implying Intel motherboards will ever support more than US govt approved technology now that they have a substantial holding in Intel
I think that's their point. You wouldn't have a choice again if Intel goes out of business.
Ouch.
UEFI is a standard, not a product. You could make your own even
Or use this…
This doesn't support many boards.
True, but I really appreciate that someone is doing it. (It’s far beyond my capabilities…)
So that just means UBIOS is explicitly for spying since UEFI is open source and a standard right?
There's no need to change mobo to have that, just install Temu app or similars.
Do we really need a UEFI replacement?
Probably not. At least not right now. But China needs one apparently.
My thoughts are "Why do they need one?". It's not like UEFI stops you doing anything.
UBIOS's unique features over UEFI include increased support for chiplets and other heterogeneous computing use-cases, such as multi-CPU motherboards with mismatching CPUs, something UEFI struggles with or does not support. It will also better support non-x86 CPU architectures such as ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch, the first major Chinese operating system.
[citation needed]
I would say this is about increasing the level of control of the platform, not about technological issues.
Edit: For example, here's the RISC-V UEFI specification.
Control is the most important thing to the CCP so it makes complete sense from their perspective. We would be free to buy into it but they would definitely force it on devices within China.
It's about having a home grown option. Can't trust Americans not to backdoor everything, and that generally conflicts with China's desire to backdoor everything.
america cannot really backdoor a specification. uefi is not software, but a specification, upon which firmwares can be built. that's another story that we happen to be calling the firmware on our computers "the uefi", but really there are quite a few different proprietary uefi implementations out there already.
so, if that ws the reason, they could have just created their own UEFI firmware, and not something different
Hey you sound like someone who knows what they are talking about - is UBIOS also a specification like UEFI is a specification? Hypothetically could others also build firmware that adheres to this UBIOS specs?
this post was the first time I heard about UBIOS, so I'm not sure, but if the article is right then yes it is a specification. and if the documents are publicly accessible, then others could hypothetically make their own firmware that is (on paper) compatible.
but there's more to it. the reason libreboot and coreboot support so few boards is that unless you can get technical documentation from the board manufacturer about how do the components on the motherboard work, its very hard to create a working firmware. reverse engineering this kind of thing is very hard and very time consuming. even the UEFI specification only tells what should the firmware present to the user and the operating system, it leaves lots of things undefined about how should it interact with the hardware, but that's ok because that's not the point of it.
then the board manufacturer is able to implement firmware verification that cryptographically prevents third party firmware from being used. on android, the boot process is a long chain of bootloaders, where the first one is stored in physically read-only storage and does not continue booting if the secondary bootloader has been replaced with an unauthorized implementation. when you unlock your phones bootloader to install a better android, you basically configure the secondary bootloader to accept booting a third party system. but if the manufacturer didn't want to let you do it, they could just take this function away.
also, the UBIOS specification could be incomplete, missing specification for some functionality that is necessary for an operating system to work with it. that can be a mistake or intentional.
Thanks for the info. Usually information like this is locked in forums that are too technical for me. I've had a newborn interest in bootloaders after having some issues with grub some time ago and more recently, migrating to grapheneOS.
It's about national security. They don't want to risk using something that they don't control for the same reason the US doesn't want to risk using something they don't control. It's why Intel probably can't fail. If Intel goes down then the US doesn't have a strong native CPU producer.
Yeah we should replace it with legacy bios.
For x86 or ARM?
I for one welcome this development. China, even if just out of national security interests, has proven to be quite a valuable partner in championing open source alternatives to Western technologies locked under key, proprietary licensing, and other such arrangements, which led to monopolies. China first started doing this with designing and actually building RISC-V architecture devices as a way to move away from x86 and ARM architectures. Now let's hope that UBIOS will be supported in a similar, open source way, so that we can gain more sovereignty over our own devices.