Get the latest tech news

A brief history of Mac firmware

From the Macintosh ROM of Classic days, to Open Firmware in Power Macs, and on to (U)EFI with Intel, and ending up with LLB and iBoot in Apple silicon Macs.

Model-specific boot.efi software also provides ongoing and additional support for boot services, including memory management, basic functions for timers and events, and for hardware access. In March 2015, two security researchers from LegbaCore, Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg, demonstrated proof-of-concept attacks on the BIOS of several computers including Dell, HP, and other PCs that could have been used to implant malicious code. Each week until it was dropped from Sonoma, eficheck checked current firmware against a local database of versions known to be ‘good’, and with the user’s permission sent a report to Apple in the event that it found discrepancies.

Get the Android app