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Questions tagged are effectively a subset of questions marked . I can't find an "official" definition of the term EFI. UEFI of course stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. So I suppose EFI would mean Extensible Firmware Interface. Do you really need both tags?

I can see a case for getting rid of and retagging all those questions with .

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2267259 observes:

UEFI is the new replacement for BIOS, the efi is a name/label of the partition where UEFI boot files are stored.

And indeed the name of the partition is the only place where I see EFI being used.

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EFI and UEFI refer to different versions of the same thing.

In the mid 1990s, Intel began working on an improvement over the PC BIOS in order to work well with the more powerful machines they were building. The result was an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), and Intel still hosts the version of the specification they published in 2002. In 2005, Intel passed EFI to a new group, the Unified EFI Forum, with representatives from several companies. This group extended the specification, publishing new versions under a new name: UEFI.

Is there value in the tags being distinct? I do not believe there is.

It may be useful to mention when features are used that are introduced in or deprecated in certain versions of the specification, but that is almost certainly a more granular breakdown than EFI vs UEFI.

Most of the questions tagged (U)EFI seem to deal with troubleshooting boot problems. These are either general enough that advice could reasonably apply to every version of the specification, or specific to a given implementation of a given version. In the former case, no tag-based distinction is necessary. In the latter case, more information is necessary than whether the machine is newer or older than 2005.

Conclusion: As it is the current and most well-known name for the specification, UEFI should be the canonical name for a combined tag, with EFI as a synonym.

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  • Thank you, that's helpful. But wouldn't UEFI be a better name for the canonical tag, since that is the official name?
    – Faheem Mitha
    Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 8:29
  • Some would take EFI as canonical as that was the original name. Others may prefer UEFI to be canonical as that is the current name. I am in the former category, but feel that either path to a merge is a benefit over leaving them distinct
    – Fox
    Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 8:36
  • Ok. Thank you for your feedback. If anyone else feels like weighing in, please do so.
    – Faheem Mitha
    Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 8:38
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    @Fox Why is the original name relevant? What's important is which tag most people expect to see. EFI wasn't popular before it became UEFI, so most people expect UEFI and that should be the canonical name.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 12:22
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    @Gilles That makes sense. I am convinced, and will probably change my conclusion to match
    – Fox
    Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 16:13
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Done.

The tag is now a synonym of and all questions tagged with are now tagged with instead.

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