Beyond BIOS

This book provides an overview of modern boot firmware, including the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (Uefi) and its associated Efi Developer Kit Ii (Edkii) firmware. The authors have each made significant contributions to developments in these areas. The reader will learn to use the latest developments in Uefi on modern hardware, including open source firmware and open hardware designs. The book begins with an exploration of interfaces exposed to higher-level software and operating systems, and commences to the left of the boot timeline, describing the flow of typical systems, beginning with the machine restart event. Software engineers working with Uefi will benefit greatly from this book, while specific sections of the book address topics relevant for a general audience: system architects, pre-operating-system application developers, operating system vendors (loader, kernel), independent hardware vendors (such as for plug-in adapters), and developers of end-user applications. As a secondary audience, project technical leaders or managers may be interested in this book to get a feel for what their engineers are doing. The reader will find: * An overview of Uefi and underlying Platform Initialization (Pi) specifications * How to create Uefi applications and drivers * Workflow to design the firmware solution for a modern platform * Advanced usages of Uefi firmware for security and manageability

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction

Chapter 2 – Basic UEFI Architecture

Chapter 3 – UEFI Driver Model

Chapter 4 – Protocols You Should Know

Chapter 5 – UEFI Runt ime

Chapter 6 – UEFI Console Services

Chapter 7 – Different Types of Platforms

Chapter 8 – DXE Basics: Core, Dispatching, and Drivers

Chapter 9 – Some Common UEFI and Pl Functio ns

Chapter 10 – Platform Security and Trust

Chapter 11 – Boot Device Selection

Chapter 12 – Boot Flows

Chapter 13 – Pre-EFI Init ialization (PEI)

Chapter 14 – Putting It All Together- Firmware Emulation

Chapter 15 – Reducing Platform Boot Times

Chapter 16 – Embedded Boot Solution

Chapter 17 – Manageability

Append ix A – Data Types

Append ix B – Status Codes

About the Author

Vincent Zimmer was born in Houston, Texas, where he also grew up. Vincent attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and achieved a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. Vincent has worked for various technology companies, including Intel Corporation, where he has been employed since 1997. While working at Intel, Vincent received his Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. During Vincent’s 30+ year career working on embedded systems and firmware, he has received over 450 US patents https://scholar.google.com/citations?