Boot Firmware for Heterogeneous Systems running Linux

Abstract

The primary role of the boot firmware is to initialize essential system components before booting an operating system. At the same time, it should provide hardware descriptions and interaction mechanism through the UEFI and ACPI standards. The current boot firmware for Enzian is unmaintainable due to its outdated design and reliance on an obsolete EDK2 version, without any obvious way to update it. Consequently, a complete rewrite is necessary. This thesis undertakes the development of a boot firmware from the ground up. Leveraging the latest version of EDK2, a UEFI implementation, the objective is to build a solid foundation that’s both comprehensible and easily maintainable. The firmware takes inspiration from existing platform ports of EDK2, resulting in a greatly simplified development process, which is further improved by utilizing the containerized build system. The implementation produced, even though not yet able to boot an OS from disk, aligns with established industry practices and aims to be a well-structured base.