Open platforms snapshot - May 2023

From https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/Intel there are a rich set of platforms for EDKII in the open. 

Other than emulation platforms like SIMICS or 32-bit IOT Quark, which are all open source, the rest of the platforms are based upon variants of the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) https://github.com/intel/fsp

 

But how did this journey begin?

The first public discussion of the need to have a simpler, more open set of platform code commenced in 2014. I described this 'min tree' effort in the following 2015 prezo  https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/OSTS-2015.pdf

 

 

 

 with guidance around how to take a large internal, closed source corpus into something smaller

 

 The strategy included the following elements

 

 

I described the value of open source for security assurance in another venue https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/documents/stts003-sf15-stts003-100f-820238.pdf

including the Baytrail-based MinnowBoard and Quark

 

The challenge at the time was how to structure the code. We used Quark, since it was fully open, to model some of the software practices https://github.com/tianocore-docs/Docs/raw/master/White_Papers/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Open_Source_IA_Firmware_Platform_Design_Guide_in_EFI_Developer_Kit_II.pdf

 

 

 

 

The approach entailed a decomposition of the workflow for configuration, porting, and feature addition.

At this point we only had Atom-based Minnow in the open. During this time we worked w/ the business units to get permission to open up a big core based platform code, namely Kaby Lake, and a Xeon big core server, namely Purley. The work is described in https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/blob/devel-MinPlatform/Platform/Intel/MinPlatformPkg/Docs/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Open_Source_IA_Firmware_Platform_Design_Guide_in_EFI_Developer_Kit_II%20-%20V2.pdf

 

 

 

 

These studies provided a decomposition both logically

 

 

and in the source code

 

 

We updated the ecosystem on this work in https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2018/speaker/

This provided an overview of the server work and also a description of the software stacking.

Another view provided the workflow of the open source core on the left, the silicon packages in the middle, and the open source platform code on the right in order to curate a complete solution.

The best description of the overall workflow with a given SOC was described in https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/documents/uefi-firmware-enabling-guide-for-the-intel-atom-processor-e3900-series-820238.pdf in 2018
 

Just as we explicated security best practices in  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4, we did describe some of this platform work that is now embodied as the 'min platform architecture' (MPA) https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Minimum-Platform-Architecture--MinPlatform.

Specifically, the book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8 and its associated site https://github.com/Apress/Firmware-Development touch on this topic

 

With the evolution of a min-tree and min platform

and the MPA stack itself.

This work is also included in training material https://github.com/tianocore-training/PlatformBuildLab_MinPlatform_FW.

 

The arc of time...

 

PS

Mentioning MPA doesn't mean that there are not other open opportunities beyond EDKII.  There is https://github.com/slimbootloader/slimbootloader/tree/master/Platform

and https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/tree/master/src/mainboard/intel

 

 

You can find info in https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7939-7 https://github.com/Apress/System-Firmware

 

for slim bootloader

 

 

and coreboot, respectively.