UEFI is a community effort by many companies in the personal-computer industry to modernize the booting process. UEFI capable systems are already shipping, and many more are in preparation. During the transition to UEFI, most platform firmware will continue to support legacy (BIOS) booting as well, to accommodate legacy-only operating systems. UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface". The UEFI specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. The Unified EFI Forum is the group responsible for developing, managing and promoting UEFI specifications. The "Adopter" membership category is free. For additional information please contact UEFI Administration at admin@uefi.org.