Microsoft & UEFI

According to this report (http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2156867/microsoft-promises-bios) from WinHEC, Microsoft will begin supporting UEFI officially with the Vista SP1 and Longhorn Server. This is actually consistent with what they said at this year's Intel IDF. However, their previous statements were so careful that many people felt Microsoft was going to pull support entirely (see the other links on the site linked above). Since Microsoft is one of the board members of UEFI, that was pretty embarrassing :-( Microsoft previously stated that they weren't seeing any BIOS vendor support on real platforms for UEFI. It is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, since if you don't support it in the OS, why would an OEM spend the money speculatively? And if the OEM doesn't build it, the OS won't test it. This is similar to the problems with SMBus battery support in ACPI. Its in the spec but nobody built systems, so the OS never officially supported it. Anyway, this positive comment from Microsoft, combined with Bill Gates mentioning it in his keynote address, should put they nay-sayers away. And if Microsoft decides to only support UEFI for X64 (EMT64/AMD64) on server, that would be great because it gets us away from the EFI32/EFI64 support nightmare (more later, short version is: can't build a BIOS with support for both at the same time) Tim