Overview

The average user is unaware of how much goes on behind the scenes in the operation of a modern computer. This is by design, Developers put a lot of time, thought, and energy into abstracting the disparate parts of the computer into a more-or-less seamless whole. Nowhere is this abstraction more obscure, even to those who program the rest of the computer, than in the program that starts the computer running.

The complexity of boot firmware has evolved to keep pace with the ever-increasing complexity of the underlying hardware and of the software that this firmware loads. Defined by its interfaces to the operating system and option ROMs, the latest architecture for boot firmware is the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). An almost infinite number of software architectures may implement EFI. This book describes the components and characteristics of EFI itself, then explains a rich architecture that implements EFI that is known as the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI, or simply as the Framework.

Both EFI and the Framework use concepts and techniques derived from the now-standard software disciplines. Although EFI and the Framework do not define an operating system, in any traditional sense, they use many concepts borrowed from that area of study. The design of EFI and Tiano also reflect the state of knowledge and trends in software engineering as well as the hard-nosed experience gained by the embedded...