As the UEFI Forum continues to make advances in the technology behind what is still called the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), ASSET has joined this standards body to assist in the debug of its latest features.
The UEFI Forum is a world-class, non-profit industry standards body of leading technology companies that promotes firmware innovation by creating specifications that enable the continual evolution of platform technologies. It is a community effort, supported by many companies, originally intending to transition from legacy BIOS (assembly language) to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (mostly written in ‘C’). Its website is here: www.uefi.org.
The UEFI Forum most recently published updates to the UEFI Specification (Version 2.6), and the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Specification (Version 6.1). These new specifications further enhance mobility and manageability of computing systems for consumers and the enterprise. For example, the new UEFI spec adds, among many other changes, a formal API definition for the RAM disk protocol. And the ACPI update includes standardized ARMv8-A (a subset of the ARM 64-bit, also known as ARM64 or AArch64) support for “firmware-first” error handling and reporting.
ASSET’s contribution to the UEFI Forum will be primarily through support of the superior debug features within our SourcePoint hardware-assisted debugger. For more information on this, read our Application Note at UEFI Debugging using SourcePoint on Intel Platforms.
