Ubios: China's Alternative to UEFI

Summary

UBIOS: China’s Alternative to UEFI and the New Era of Firmware Standards UBIOS: China’s Alternative to UEFI and the New Era of Firmware Standards Understanding UBIOS: China’s New BIOS Standard and the Push for Technological Independence What is UBIOS? UBIOS (Unified Basic Input Output System) is a new firmware standard officially released by China’s Global Computing Consortium (GCC) on October 17, 2025, with the standard number T/GCC 3007—2025. This represents China’s first complete, standardized, and extensible indigenous firmware system standard. UBIOS is defined as a unified basic input output system that supports distributed architecture and hardware-software-chip collaboration. It includes several key components: the UBIOS interface, Unified Virtual Bus (UVB), Function ID (FID), Information ID (IID), User ID, UB Processing Unit (UBPU), and Entity management. The standard was jointly drafted by major Chinese technology companies including Huawei, UnionTech, and Soft Connect, among others. It provides a standardized framework for building basic input-output systems, aimed at improving system compatibility and stability. What is the Difference Between UBIOS and Traditional BIOS/UEFI? Traditional BIOS Architecture Traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is firmware stored on PC motherboards that initializes and tests system hardware components during power-on self-test (POST) and loads a boot loader from storage devices. Legacy BIOS code was written in 16-bit assembly and run in real mode, with each implementation being proprietary to specific Independent BIOS Vendors (IBVs) like AMI or Phoenix. UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) emerged as the modern successor to BIOS. UEFI was originally developed by Intel during the mid-1990s as Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to address BIOS limitations such as 16-bit real mode, 1MB addressable memory space, and PC AT hardware restrictions. UEFI provides advantages including support for larger storage devices...