UEFI: A Retrospective

This nifty article by my friend and co-author Vincent Zimmer takes a look at the UEFI specification from his perspective as one of its early proponents within Intel, as an author (Beyond BIOS), and more recently as a steward of the specification and innovator post-UEFI.

From my perspective as a BIOS architect, the process was never a smooth one. The rise of the industry specification bodies is something we take for granted. If you look at older PC specifications, like ACPI and APM and BBS, they were cooperatively developed by a small cadre of companies, like Microsoft, Toshiba, Phoenix and Compaq. As EFI was coming along from Intel, the BIOS vendors were also developing standards and promoting these standards. Never heard of PowerBIOS from Award? Or how about Manticore or CSI from Phoenix? With the industry standards group approach, any one of these could have become what UEFI is now. Maybe. If the originating company was willing to loosen their grip. It was, in accepting this key point, what allowed Intel and their partners like HP to gain critical agreement within the PC ecosystem.

Sometimes relinquishing control gets you what you want, but the process is more chaotic. Certainly true for UEFI.

Phoenix and AMI Press Release: ARMv8, AppliedMicro and an IDE

[Disclaimer: I am an ex-Phoenix employee and currently work for a Phoenix and AMI competitor]

UPDATE: Ran into a Phoenix employee at the ARM TechCon yesterday, and he invited me to go watch their X-Gene firmware at 11:00am. Cool.

Phoenix Technologies, one of the three mainstream independent BIOS vendors (IBVs) just put out a press release talking about their support for the new ARMv8 64-bit processor architecture and their relationship with AppliedMicro, who is developing their own variant, called the X-Gene. Kudos. Good stuff. Immediately followed by AMI. AMI goes further to say they will be demoing it today at the ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, where I am headed as I type this.

It is with the 64-bit ARM that I expect to see the real transition to UEFI boot-loaders happen. With 32-bit ARM cores, there were a lot of supported choices because UEFI was (relatively speaking) late to the game. But ARM has been working with the ABST (ARM Binding Sub Team) within UEFI for a while. So, the question is: will QNX and WindRiver and other embedded OS' go ahead and follow Linux's lead and support UEFI as the standard boot model for ARM.

But the funny thing about the Phoenix press-release is that it contains IDE in the title, but nowhere in the text does it ever talk about an "integrated development environment". An IDE would be something like Eclipse or Visual Studio. They do talk about an "enhanced build environment" and "award winning...tools". So I went to their web site to check the press release and couldn't find it there. But when I looked at other sites, they used the phrase "Independent Build Environment". Ok. That makes more sense. One of the other blogs just muffed it.