---
title: 'UEFI: What Is It and How Can We Exploit It For Fun And Profit'
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2017/program/proposals/326
beginning: '2017-10-06T16:30:00.000-07:00'
end: '2017-10-06T17:20:00.000-07:00'
presenters:
- name: Ian Santopietro
  affiliation: System76
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/607
  gravatar_id: 23f26a730712ee27d91883471fe9a1a4
  biography: Using Linux since 2006, I first got seriously into Ubuntu when I got
    hired as a support technician at System76 in 2010. Many Job title Adjustments
    later, I'm still there as a Desktop Engineer working on our new Pop_OS.
---

UEFI carries with it a lot of negative connotations. While it's far from perfect, it's certainly not the overarching evil thing that a lot of us make it out to be. Here we'll discuss the facts and faction surrounding UEFI and the difference between it and other related technologies like Secure Boot, Coreboot, BIOS, and others.

After this we'll take a look at a direct comparison between booting a computer using both UEFI and the Legacy BIOS. And we'll have a look at some of the really neat things the UEFI Environment lets us do, such as playing games without an OS, updating system firmware without DOS, and even writing bootloaders in 300 lines of Python.
