China has worked for years to further separate its computing progress from the United States and its tech companies. Today [October 23, 2025] heralds a major development to this end, as the Global Computing Consortium has announced the "UBIOS" global standard, a new replacement for UEFI and BIOS. The GCC's new standard is a rebuilding of BIOS firmware from the ground up, bypassing UEFI development entirely.
UBIOS, or "Unified Basic Input/Output System", is a firmware standard to replace BIOS and UEFI, the first and most prolific motherboard firmware architectures, respectively, that bridge the gap between processors and operating systems. The UBIOS standard was drafted by 13 Chinese tech companies, including Huawei, CESI (China Electronics Standardization Institute), Byosoft, and Kunlun Tech.
The working group claims it chose to avoid the UEFI spec due to the development bloat of UEFI and TianoCore EDK II, the Intel-made reference implementation of UEFI used almost universally among UEFI hardware and software developers.
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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Gaaark on Saturday November 01, @08:55PM
LoongArch is not an operating system, although it will support Linux operating systems.
"The LoongArch ecosystem is growing, with support from various Linux distributions. Gentoo has an official LoongArch development project, and Arch Linux, CLFS, and Slackware also have LoongArch ports.
The architecture is supported in QEMU since version 7.1.0, enabling emulation for development and testing.
Loongson has also provided a 3C5000L server to the Gentoo community for testing purposes."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Informative) by mrpg on Sunday November 02, @04:38AM
https://docs.kernel.org/arch/loongarch/introduction.html [kernel.org]
1. Introduction to LoongArch
LoongArch is a new RISC ISA, which is a bit like MIPS or RISC-V. There are currently 3 variants: a reduced 32-bit version (LA32R), a standard 32-bit version (LA32S) and a 64-bit version (LA64). There are 4 privilege levels (PLVs) defined in LoongArch: PLV0~PLV3, from high to low. Kernel runs at PLV0 while applications run at PLV3. This document introduces the registers, basic instruction set, virtual memory and some other topics of LoongArch.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jb on Sunday November 02, @05:57AM (1 child)
As far as I can tell, no actual specification specification has been published yet, nor any reference implementation.
The idea may well be a good one in principle, but unless the standards process is completely open, public and unencumbered, the result will be pointless. A proprietary blob from one cartel is just as bad as a proprietary blob from any other cartel.
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Sunday November 02, @07:19AM
It won't be pointless from China's point of view. Replacing a US-originated blob with God knows what in it could be exactly what they're aiming for, and whether it takes root outside China is irrelevant.
Having said that, if they go out of their way to make it Linux-friendly I think they'll have a significant leg up over UEFI.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 02, @02:39PM (3 children)
If you could write a practical real world feature list what would it include and why:
Faster. Computers only get slower over time. Smart TVs that take minutes to boot, slow PC boots, phones and tablets that take forever to boot. Do whatever's necessary to make the BIOS boot in, say, 10 ms, from cold dead unpowered metal to the OS is running.
Some kind of universal virtualization/physicalization API where you can transfer virtual machine image files and physical machine SSD images back and forth semi-transparently. The non-FOSS people will be pretty mad, I think.
A better speed API than APM/ACPI. "power performance states" are kind of ridiculous just feed it a float or a fixed point int percentage of full speed and call it good.
How about cooperating with jtag probes? Like instead of 1983 POST codes how about a virtual JTAG device with the state of the boot process so you can compare the jtag scan of each device with the bios's idea of its internal state. That would be cool.
Some explanation of why its better to use this than Coreboot/libreboot
"More and better IPMI" I like IPMI servers, how about IPMI on everything and add even more features to it.
An upgrade process more like MCUboot than "flash and pray" like desktops. I'm talking about the A/B system where a boot failure of a new boot means you run the old code. Storage is cheap. All you need is enough A/B to avoid a bricking.
More management level: a promise it'll work on Proxmox and similar virtualization technologies. Great development tool...
If you've never done assembly or experienced romcc it's wild. So lets create a c compiler that doesn't use memory so you can initialize the DRAM system. Amazingly it works! You'd think there would be interest in microcontroller boot loaders. Maybe mcuboot does that I have never checked LOL.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Sunday November 02, @04:49PM (2 children)
The boot prom on an ancient SPARC box with its Forth language interpreter is still more useful than UEFI.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday November 02, @05:45PM
It still lives (in a fashion), as it turned into open firmware [wikipedia.org] (which was an IEEE standard), of which coreboot [wikipedia.org] is the x86 implementation.
Quite frankly, if China was really interested in making an open standard, they could have just used the above.
Therefore I suspect this is more about them building their own proprietary blob to compete with the "five-eyes" backdoored blob. If we are lucky we will get to pick which of the blobs to entrust our data to.
The more time passes, the more I am leaning towards moving back to an old laptop and installing coreboot/libreboot to manage the BIOS.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 03, @02:08PM
Someone else can write a YAML parser in FORTH at least in the dialect of FORTH in the BIOS and then follow that with an Ansible YAML file and the BIOS can configure itself remotely. Assuming you have a SSH server written in FORTH.
(Score: 3, Touché) by AlwaysNever on Sunday November 02, @07:20PM
...as the catalyst of China's IT independence and sovereignty.