The Tale of Three Conferences

This week has been a blizzard of news and announcements from three conferences that I care about, all this week. First, there was EELive! in San Jose, CA which focused on embedded systems (or, as they now like to call it, the IoT). Second, there was Intel's Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China where my company (Insyde Software) was exhibiting and speaking. Finally, there was Microsoft's Build 2014 which I was watching with avid interest with live streaming and press releases flowing. UEFI was there, to either be promoted or vilified or both, in all three.

At first glance, at EELive, you would think that no one is paying attention to UEFI. Part of this was because Intel was busy promoting FSP, touting how it could be plugged into any boot loader, including coreboot. But the Galileo board that they were showing comes with a UEFI solution. And, under the hood, FSP is really extracted firmware drivers from Intel's UEFI-based reference code, packaged in UEFI-standard firmware volume format, with a little director binary inserted to allow direct calls into the driver entry points. The other reason is that 32-bit and smaller processors still dominate the IoT space and many of those are ARM designs. ARM platform 32-bit designs have used other boot loaders traditionally, but with 64-bit ARM itself is heavily pushing UEFI as a standard boot architecture. Many discussions around UEFI have to do with complexity. And there is something to these discussions, since the very power and flexibility of UEFI has led to implementations (like that on tianocore.org) which are broken into hundreds of pieces, where assembling the right one requires the right recipes. Most embedded vendors don't need their firmware distribution to be as complicated as their Linux distribution (see yoctoproject.org).

Then there's IDF. Of course, there was the Insyde poster chat: Implementing Dual OS Solutions with UEFI FIrmware" (how to switch between two active OS sessions w/just firmware support). Intel delivered their obligatory Quark and FSP remarks. But it also put out two additional UEFI-related notes. The first appeared in the unlikely session titled "Delivering Compelling User Experiences on Intel® Platforms: Audio, Voice, Speech and Fingerprint Sensors and Biometric Authentication" But in the very back of this presentation, they talked about security issues pertinent to BIOS, including replay-attack prevention related to Real-Time Clock battery removal and secure firmware updates using the UEFI capsule update method described in the UEFI 2.4 specification. It really seemed out of place, but hey... They also recommend adding their new CHIPSEC tool, which performs security checks on chipset and firmware settings. It is available on github.

And then the Intel Android team showed their Android build tool which would create a BSP for your platform and hey, it would also customize your firmware at the same time. It leverages the Unified Binary Management Suite (UBMS), which you can see here at about the 21 minute mark. This shows the increasing co-design process required for configuring your firmware and your OS installation. Many times, the firmware and the OS need to know the same types of information about the platform. For example, which drivers to include, GPIO routing, etc. Especially on OS' that don't use ACPI and that don't rely on the firmware passing them anything (like Android).

Finally, there's Microsoft Build event. We got a definitive date for the Update 1 (with no major new BIOS requirements! Sigh of relief), Microsoft's plan to offer Windows for $0 for certain platforms, Windows booting on Quark(!). And a lot of advice about how to integrate off-SoC sensors and how to write apps that span Windows and Windows Phone.

Hard to breathe. Need air. Next week I'll have a chance to reflect further on what some of these mean. How can we take advantage of vertical integration? How can we reassure folks of security in a world where firmware is increasingly decentralized and under attack? (Did I mention EELive! had a Black Hat track???) More later....