Firmware Development: A Guide to Specialized Systemic Knowledge

Acknowledgement : This section acknowledges the contribution of various domain experts.

Chapter 1: Introduction about the book : System Firmware: An Essential Guide to Open Source and Embedded Solutions book is an essential book to understand the basic system firmware knowledge and Specialized Systemic Knowledge for Firmware Development is about to going deep into other associated pieces which make the system firmware development complete like understanding the build tools for creating the final firmware image, allow configuration which working between multiple independent firmware block, ensure seamless update of the system firmware. This book will help its reader to understand how critical system firmware security is to define a secure platform. It's also a handbook for learning basic source code management required for system firmware development.

This section would cover:

Chapter 2: Spotlight on future firmware : Chapter 4 and 7 has already provided details on specific boot firmware and payloads. This section to share additional work relationship with those various firmware combinations as below:

• System Firmware Development model using open source firmware

• • Hybrid system firmware development model on x86 systems.
    • boot firmware (coreboot) + FSP + payload (linuxboot)
    • EDKII Minplatform
  • Open Source System firmware development on RISC-V using Oreboot (Coreboot without 'C')
• Device Firmware Development model using open source firmware
• Explaining the evolution in Discrete Graphics Device firmware from legacy Option ROM till modern EDKII-based driver to nullify the legacy concepts.

Chapter 3: Tools : Since the historical past, tools were something that remain constant indicators for human race progress. It can easily refer to tool-based progression, starting from stone age to iron age and even tools being used in the modern era, all intended to ease human effort. Similarly, there is a significant need to have the right tools while developing the boot firmware product. This section focuses on the details on various types of tools that a user should be equipped with while creating their own boot firmware.

Chapter 4 : Infrastructure for building own system firmware . This chapter would focus on understanding the open source project infrastructure like GitHub and its code upstreaming process, review process etc. Also, migrating the project from closed source system firmware to open source firmware also needs an adaptation towards "Code of Conduct", "Coding Standard" etc.

Chapter 5: Debugging : In a product development cycle debugging is the most widely used area where users would like to explore the different means to identify how to fix a problem. This section provides different debugging methodology used in boot firmware like legacy methods, advanced software-based debug, hardware-based debug, source code level debug etc.

Chapter 6: Security in its core : Firmware being closed to hardware and abstracting the operating system from underlying hardware provides more reason to ensure the communication channel is secure. This section is to focus on designing the boot firmware, keeping security in mind. As industry is moving towards more cloud driven services hence need to ensure the secure firmware communication within firmware space and even from OS to firmware using trusted APIs.

Chapter 7: Looking into the future of System Firmware : This section discusses some key forward looking items that system firmware in the future would inherit to design a simple, high performing, open source friendly and secure solution.

PART I: Designing LITE Firmware : The real need of the firmware is to perform essential hardware initialization to boot the platform to the operating system. But the firmware boundary has grown so much in the last 10 years that sometimes it's very obviously referred to as beyond BIOS. The goal of this section is to design a LITE boot firmware to shrink the firmware boundary by adopting 4 principals as Performance, Simplicity, Security and Open Source.

PART II: Designing Feature Kernel : Payload being the integral part of system firmware is responsible of doing very minimum and redundant task that could easily be replaced with a boot kernel, this process would also helps to bring the kernel into TCB (Trusted Computing Boundary) to allow performing advance operations into boot firmware space with reduced firmware boundary.

PART III: Design multithread boot firmware : There are multiple ways to design a fast boot firmware solution, the easiest solution would be choosing a high cost BOM (Bill of Material) which pre-initialized hardware controller by its device firmware. But the real exploration would be how to design a fast boot firmware without increasing the platform BOM cost. The best applicable method in that case would be utilizing the existing CPU capabilities, on modern hardware, all SoC vendors are providing way more required numbers of cores or logical processors hence future boot firmware should adopt this hardware or CPU capabilities to reduce platform boot time.

PART IV: Innovation in Hardware Design: System firmware being complicated due to the limited innovation in hardware design and to support legacy hardware. An efficient hardware design can help to reduce the system firmware boundary and make the design more scalable without increasing the platform BoM cost.

Apart from this Appendix(s) sections for discussing the definition of future firmware programming using safe programming language.