Variables

UEFI provides fairly flexible key/value variable storage.

Each variable is identified by a key consisting of a UCS-2 null-terminated name plus a vendor GUID. The vendor GUID serves as a namespace for variables so that different vendors don't accidentally overwrite or misinterpret another vendor's variable if they happen to have the same name.

The data stored in each variable is an arbitrary byte array.

Attributes

Each variable has attributes (represented as bit flags) associated with it that affect how it is stored and how it can be accessed.

If the BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS and RUNTIME_ACCESS bits are set, the variable can be accessed during both the Boot Services and Runtime stages. If only BOOTSERVICE_ACCESS is set then the variable can neither be read nor written to after exiting boot services.

Another important attribute is the NON_VOLATILE bit. If this bit is not set, the variable will be stored in normal memory and will not persist across a power cycle. If this bit is set, the variable will be stored in special non-volatile memory. You should be careful about writing variables of this type, because the non-volatile storage can be very limited in size. There have been cases where a vendor's poor UEFI implementation caused the machine not too boot once the storage became too full. Even figuring out how much space is in use can be tricky due to deletion being implemented via garbage collection. Matthew Garret's article "Dealing with UEFI non-volatile memory quirks" has more details.

Most of the other attributes relate to authenticated variables, which can be used to prevent changes to a variable by unauthorized programs.