Many hardware vendors produce excellent hardware but do not make sufficient technical information about them available to allow their hardware to be used with Linux systems. This includes BIOS and other firmware on main boards and core chip sets.
Until 2007 a consortium of vendors was working to improve this situation by producing a Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit, according to an INTEL employee (see the comment by arjan).
What has happened since 2007?
There is a bit of an update from 2008 here.
And there is this comparing LinuxBIOS with EFI.
The UEFI standard defines a GUID Partition Table. This is proposed and somewhat used as a replacement for the traditional partition table.
The traditional partition table is not well defined, it seems. There is some consistency between systems but also much inconsistency. Software interacting with partition tables includes BIOS and operating systems. Andries Brouwer has written a description of it. And here's another from ata-atapi.com.
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