Yesterday my last day in DuPont after nearly 18 years, 15 of those in the same cube, here at this WA Intel site. Off to work at the Seattle office in early '15. So long, DuPont, and thanks for the memories. And all of the Fish, although in this case 'Andrew Fish.' Although Fish doesn't work at Intel any longer, the inventor of the "Intel Boot Initiative" (IBI), which became EFI/UEFI, still lives in the South Puget Sound. We broke bread for the final time at our favorite local restaurant.
This is the "R&R" mentioned in the acknowledgements section of the 2nd edition of Beyond BIOS http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/, "Also many of this team will recall over ten years of "design discussions" at R&R." I captured Fish on the left and Mark Doran http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/bios?n=Mark%20S.%20Doran&f=searchAll on the right eating our final Teriyaki bowls. As always, good conversations on firmware and technology. And the picture is also epic in that the duo often introduces itself as "Andrew Fish who invented EFI, and Mark Doran who delivered it to the industry." Mike Kinney & I held down the other side of the table. I've learned quite a bit working with all three of these colleagues over these many years.
During my final days at Compaq in late 1996 I talked to Intel about joining, and my options were "Join Portland for Xeon, or DuPont for Merced." I was inspired by the thought of joining the 64-bit revolution, so there was no doubt in my mind as to which locale to choose. Also, having grown up in Texas, the Pacific Northwest was a large unknown, so the distinction between OR and WA didn't even factor into my decision.
And my whole tenure at Intel in DuPont since February 1997 has been boot firmware. I began with a PC/AT BIOS underneath the Merced System Abstraction Layer (SAL), with the original OS loader interface of SAL_PROC (0x13), as a 64-bit mapping of BIOS 13h. Same for video mapping of SAL_PROC (0x10), keyboard of SAL_PROC (0x13), etc. The OS community wasn't amused.
As the OS interface evolved to C-based IBI, then EFI, the underlying boot infrastructure changed. I moved from driving some of the SAL-on-BIOS for server (aka "FrankenBIOS"), to the short-lived Workstation Product Division (WPD) where we evolved a C-based boot solution. The latter pioneered art such as the Furball and interposer, which were the predecessor of the Intel Framework Compatibility Support Module (CSM) and CSM16 binary. We called the former 'furball' because it was something we imagined a native 32-bit (IA32) and 64-bit (Itanium) firmware solution would eventually 'cough up', with a less than pleasant imagery derived from the world of cats.
In 1999 we had evolved the workstation firmware to binary modules called "Plug-In Modules", or PIM's. I recall a fateful meeting with the lead on that effort and my colleague visiting from OR. The conversation went something like 'And we can also put the PIM's into option ROMs, too.' At that point I realized the trajectory was ill-fated since the problem with open platforms and option ROM's isn't factoring code to run in that storage container so much as 'how' to interoperate with the system firmware, namely what API's to expose, where to define them, and how to evolve this art. And to that end, I realized that EFI would win as it was the only man standing to solve this problem.
Specifically, EFI nailed down the interface methodology to the OS loader and option ROM community where the broad interoperability was needed. Moving the underlying initialization firmware to a new methodology, such as what became Intel Framework and then UEFI PI was valuable, but not the necessary first step. The first step was to lay the foundation for broad interop in order to have time for the top-level OS and IHV ecosystem to start moving their dependent infrastructure.
At that point in my career when I had that realization, I was lucky enough to have a friend and Intel colleague like Andrew Fish who suggested I have lunch with Mark Doran. Afterward I on-boarded to the EFI team in 1999 and the rest has been a great 15 run on helping evolve EFI into UEFI, EFI-on-BIOS into Framework and then UEFI PI, and the open source offering from "EFI Sample" to EDK to today's EDK II. Since then a lot of code and specifications have ensued
with hopefully more to come in 2015+. Not sure if there is another 15 years into the run. Although one co-developer of Tiano, the code-name for the underlying Framework (and now PI work) quipped a few years ago "We said Tiano was the '20 year' BIOS replacement solution, so when did you start counting?"
Speaking of 2015+, I had better get back to work if I want to get a head start on the next way of the firmware revolution started in South Puget Sound, WA.
Cheers
This is the "R&R" mentioned in the acknowledgements section of the 2nd edition of Beyond BIOS http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/, "Also many of this team will recall over ten years of "design discussions" at R&R." I captured Fish on the left and Mark Doran http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/bios?n=Mark%20S.%20Doran&f=searchAll on the right eating our final Teriyaki bowls. As always, good conversations on firmware and technology. And the picture is also epic in that the duo often introduces itself as "Andrew Fish who invented EFI, and Mark Doran who delivered it to the industry." Mike Kinney & I held down the other side of the table. I've learned quite a bit working with all three of these colleagues over these many years.
During my final days at Compaq in late 1996 I talked to Intel about joining, and my options were "Join Portland for Xeon, or DuPont for Merced." I was inspired by the thought of joining the 64-bit revolution, so there was no doubt in my mind as to which locale to choose. Also, having grown up in Texas, the Pacific Northwest was a large unknown, so the distinction between OR and WA didn't even factor into my decision.
And my whole tenure at Intel in DuPont since February 1997 has been boot firmware. I began with a PC/AT BIOS underneath the Merced System Abstraction Layer (SAL), with the original OS loader interface of SAL_PROC (0x13), as a 64-bit mapping of BIOS 13h. Same for video mapping of SAL_PROC (0x10), keyboard of SAL_PROC (0x13), etc. The OS community wasn't amused.
As the OS interface evolved to C-based IBI, then EFI, the underlying boot infrastructure changed. I moved from driving some of the SAL-on-BIOS for server (aka "FrankenBIOS"), to the short-lived Workstation Product Division (WPD) where we evolved a C-based boot solution. The latter pioneered art such as the Furball and interposer, which were the predecessor of the Intel Framework Compatibility Support Module (CSM) and CSM16 binary. We called the former 'furball' because it was something we imagined a native 32-bit (IA32) and 64-bit (Itanium) firmware solution would eventually 'cough up', with a less than pleasant imagery derived from the world of cats.
In 1999 we had evolved the workstation firmware to binary modules called "Plug-In Modules", or PIM's. I recall a fateful meeting with the lead on that effort and my colleague visiting from OR. The conversation went something like 'And we can also put the PIM's into option ROMs, too.' At that point I realized the trajectory was ill-fated since the problem with open platforms and option ROM's isn't factoring code to run in that storage container so much as 'how' to interoperate with the system firmware, namely what API's to expose, where to define them, and how to evolve this art. And to that end, I realized that EFI would win as it was the only man standing to solve this problem.
Specifically, EFI nailed down the interface methodology to the OS loader and option ROM community where the broad interoperability was needed. Moving the underlying initialization firmware to a new methodology, such as what became Intel Framework and then UEFI PI was valuable, but not the necessary first step. The first step was to lay the foundation for broad interop in order to have time for the top-level OS and IHV ecosystem to start moving their dependent infrastructure.
At that point in my career when I had that realization, I was lucky enough to have a friend and Intel colleague like Andrew Fish who suggested I have lunch with Mark Doran. Afterward I on-boarded to the EFI team in 1999 and the rest has been a great 15 run on helping evolve EFI into UEFI, EFI-on-BIOS into Framework and then UEFI PI, and the open source offering from "EFI Sample" to EDK to today's EDK II. Since then a lot of code and specifications have ensued
with hopefully more to come in 2015+. Not sure if there is another 15 years into the run. Although one co-developer of Tiano, the code-name for the underlying Framework (and now PI work) quipped a few years ago "We said Tiano was the '20 year' BIOS replacement solution, so when did you start counting?"
Speaking of 2015+, I had better get back to work if I want to get a head start on the next way of the firmware revolution started in South Puget Sound, WA.
Cheers
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