Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), has brought about changes within the Intel® BIOS community and is being adopted by the ARM® community. Naturally, as with any software endeavor, the code base is growing and navigation through what was a simple framework is becoming a real challenge.
Debugging the Pre-UEFI Initialization Modules (PEI), Driver Execution Environments (DXE) or Hand-Off Blocks ( HOBs) can be a real time sink without help from somewhere. Most likely you didn’t write all the code but took the standard and made some modifications to handle your target environment. This makes navigation a challenge, but, thankfully, symbols are available to guide you. The problem sometimes is: what symbol do you need?
Our new application note, “UEFI Framework Debugging”, as well as a macro that’s part of our SourcePoint™ debugger, provide much needed guidance for software developers. The SourcePoint macro, which is explained in the app note, provides navigation guidance as you move through each of the framework’s code stages so you don’t try to access an area of the framework before it becomes initialized.
In general, you’ll be able to debug UEFI and navigate much easier than simply peeking and poking into code you didn’t write. You’ll be able to concentrate on the way your code interacts with the existing code base and the hardware. This application note provides an example of how to debug UEFI code on a real system. You’ll be debugging like a pro before you know it. Check out our application note and save your weekends for something better than being in the office debugging someone else’s code. Download the app note, UEFI Framework Debugging, now.
