4 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 4 hours ago by matthewacbroad.)
Could the ASUS P6T Deluxe be given UEFI through Express Gate?
I've been thinking about an idea for the ASUS P6T Deluxe.
The board uses an older AMI BIOS, not UEFI, but it also has ASUS Express Gate integrated into the BIOS. When Express Gate is enabled, the normal BIOS boot screen can hand control over to Express Gate, which effectively takes over the display and runs its own environment.
So instead of trying to completely replace the P6T's original BIOS, what if we used the Express Gate portion of the firmware as the entry point for a custom UEFI environment?
The basic idea would be:
P6T power-on → original AMI BIOS initializes hardware → Express Gate mechanism launches → custom UEFI environment takes its place → UEFI boot manager → Windows/Linux
The original ASUS BIOS could potentially remain responsible for the board-specific initialization:
The goal wouldn't necessarily be to "convert the entire P6T BIOS into UEFI." It would be more like using something the existing firmware already knows how to launch as a bridge into a modern firmware environment.
Ideally, it could eventually provide things the original P6T never had:
Obviously, there are huge technical questions:
How does the P6T's AMI BIOS actually launch Express Gate?
Where exactly is Express Gate stored in the firmware?
How much space does it occupy?
Can that execution path be redirected to a UEFI payload?
Does the BIOS initialize enough hardware beforehand for UEFI to take over?
The P6T Deluxe is especially interesting because its BIOS is only 16 Mb (2 MB), so space would be a major constraint.
I'm wondering whether this is actually technically possible rather than simply assuming an old X58 board can never have UEFI.
The first step would probably be to dump/analyze the final P6T Deluxe BIOS 2209, locate the Express Gate module, understand its loader, and see exactly what ASUS is doing when Express Gate takes over.
Has anyone ever investigated replacing ASUS Express Gate with a custom firmware/UEFI payload on an older AMI BIOS board?
EDIT: Idea two would be Express Gate = Old Linux, edit or inject new linux but just uefi/bootloader/shell style with uefi support that can boot OS's (off sata/pcie)
I've been thinking about an idea for the ASUS P6T Deluxe.
The board uses an older AMI BIOS, not UEFI, but it also has ASUS Express Gate integrated into the BIOS. When Express Gate is enabled, the normal BIOS boot screen can hand control over to Express Gate, which effectively takes over the display and runs its own environment.
So instead of trying to completely replace the P6T's original BIOS, what if we used the Express Gate portion of the firmware as the entry point for a custom UEFI environment?
The basic idea would be:
P6T power-on → original AMI BIOS initializes hardware → Express Gate mechanism launches → custom UEFI environment takes its place → UEFI boot manager → Windows/Linux
The original ASUS BIOS could potentially remain responsible for the board-specific initialization:
- X58 chipset
- ICH10R
- CPU
- RAM
- PCIe
- SATA
- USB
- Super I/O
- etc.
The goal wouldn't necessarily be to "convert the entire P6T BIOS into UEFI." It would be more like using something the existing firmware already knows how to launch as a bridge into a modern firmware environment.
Ideally, it could eventually provide things the original P6T never had:
- UEFI boot
- GPT boot
- NVMe boot
- modern UEFI drivers
- graphical firmware interface
- UEFI boot manager
- potentially Secure Boot
- modern hardware information
Obviously, there are huge technical questions:
How does the P6T's AMI BIOS actually launch Express Gate?
Where exactly is Express Gate stored in the firmware?
How much space does it occupy?
Can that execution path be redirected to a UEFI payload?
Does the BIOS initialize enough hardware beforehand for UEFI to take over?
The P6T Deluxe is especially interesting because its BIOS is only 16 Mb (2 MB), so space would be a major constraint.
I'm wondering whether this is actually technically possible rather than simply assuming an old X58 board can never have UEFI.
The first step would probably be to dump/analyze the final P6T Deluxe BIOS 2209, locate the Express Gate module, understand its loader, and see exactly what ASUS is doing when Express Gate takes over.
Has anyone ever investigated replacing ASUS Express Gate with a custom firmware/UEFI payload on an older AMI BIOS board?
EDIT: Idea two would be Express Gate = Old Linux, edit or inject new linux but just uefi/bootloader/shell style with uefi support that can boot OS's (off sata/pcie)





