Find the right bootloader solution or combination of firmware required to boot a platform considering its security, product features, and optimized boot solutions. This book covers system boot firmware, focusing on real-world firmware migration from closed source to open source adaptation.

The book provides an architectural overview of popular boot firmware. This includes both closed sourced and/or open source in nature, such as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), coreboot, and Slim Bootloader and their applicable market segments based on product development and deployment requirements.

• Why open source firmware is used over closed source
• The pros and cons of closed and open source firmware
• A hybrid work model: for faster bring-up activity using closed source, binary integrated with open source firmware

What You Will Learn

• Understand the architecture of standard and popular boot firmware
• Pick the correct bootloader for your required target hardware
• Design a hybrid workflow model for the latest chipset platform
• Understand popular payload architectures and offerings for embedded systems
• Select the right payload for your bootloader solution to boot to the operating system
• Optimize the system firmware boot time based on your target hardware requirement
• Know the product development cycle using open source firmware development

Subrata Banik is a Firmware Engineer with Intel Corporation and has been involved in firmware development across UEFI, coreboot for IA, and ARM platforms over the course of his career. He has experience working for all leading PC makers. Subrata is active in open source firmware development across different projects such as coreboot, EDKII, etc., and he has more than 600 patches in the open firmware community, and he is one of the top 10 open source firmware contributors. Subrata has 15 patents and is very passionate about learning new technology and sharing knowledge among enthusiast engineers. He has presented at industry events such as the Open Source Firmware Conference, Institute for Security and Technology, Intel Developer Forum, and others.

Vincent Zimmer is a Senior Principal Engineer in the Architecture, Graphics, and Software Group of the Intel corporation. He has been engaged in firmware development for over 25 years and leads the UEFI Security sub-team. Vincent has presented at industry events such as the Open Source Firmware Conference, Linux Fest Northwest, Intel Developer Forum, UEFI Plugfest, Open Compute Project Summit, BlackHat Las Vegas, BSides Seattle, Toorcon, and Cansecwest. In addition to collaborating on many white papers, Vincent has co-authored several books on firmware, papers, and over 400 issued US patents.

Preface: This section to capture the author's personal experience about the current available bootloader solutions for target hardware and why authors think this book might be helpful for the target audience.

Acknowledgement: This section acknowledges the contribution of domain expert(s) who has contributed into this book apart from the authors.

Chapter 1: Introduction about the book: System Firmware: An Essential Guide to Open Source and Embedded Solutions book is a handbook for target audience to learn about the basics of system boot firmware, understand various different types of solutions available while designing system firmware for target embedded system. This book will help its reader to understand the minimal knowledge required to start the firmware journey, understanding the different system firmware architecture and find the right bootloader solution or combinations of firmware's required to boot the platform.

This section would cover:

• Motivation for this book
• Who is the Reader?
• Top reasons to migrate to open source firmware solution from close source
What are the contents?

Chapter 2: Starter: To provide the historical introduction about the boot firmware, its origin, what all different solutions available like closed soured boot firmware and open source boot firmware. Define the goals for readers to create their own open source boot firmware for target hardware, create hybrid work model if case SoC vendors still has some proprietary close source firmware to work with open source firmware to develop the target hardware along with non-goals like understanding the architecture of all possible bootloaders, payloads and firmware offerings, understand the bootloader security aspect while developing the product, scope of improving the quality of service for boot firmware using multi core environment, learn from the case study about optimizing boot firmware boot prints and boot time by introducing various concepts.

Chapter 3: Knowing your Hardware: This section provides detailed understanding of hardware interfaces that firmware needs to manage prior to boot to an operating system. This is a very basic understanding section of system boot firmware without which one really can't make progress further into their bootloader journey. A good understanding of hardware interfaces and how to program those interfaces is a minimum expectation from any BIOS engineer while working on any hardware project. Idea here is to provide ample details on any sample motherboard design and required programmable hardware interface at boot time, for example: UART, SPI, USB, SATA, Display etc.

Chapter 4: Understanding Bootloader and its minimum requirements: There are many different types of firmware that exist based on underlying hardware requirements like system boot firmware, device firmware, platform security firmware, manageability firmware. Each firmware has its minimum requirements to complete its assigned task to initialize the underlying hardware and/or abstract the hardware to higher level applications. This section is to focus on system boot firmware and provide details about what is a bootloader, what are the basic characteristics a firmware must call it bootloader, finally understanding the minimum requirement to design a bootloader. This book would be like a handbook for the reader where the reader would be in a comfortable position to design its own bootloader at the end of this session. It won't be possible to do so unless the reader has understood the basic expectation from the bootloader and upcoming chapters would guide readers to choose the appropriate bootloader for the target hardware.

Chapter 5: Different types of bootloaders: BIOS as acronym suggest is responsible for Basic Input/ Output System. The BIOS in modern PCs initializes and tests the system hardware components and loads an operating system from a mass memory device. If a developer wants to write their own bootloader on any architecture, (ARM, IA, RISC etc.) then they must gather the appropriate documents (which aren't always known), hence Chapter 3 is to provide those specific details about designing their own bootloader. And this section is to provide the architectural details about the popular or market leading bootloaders along with its applicable market segments because of its characteristics: idea here is to understand the Pros and Cons of each offering.

• EFI came during early development of the first Intel-HP Itanium sys…