Beyond Bios: Implementing the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface with Intel's Framework

By Phil Sharp

Beyond BIOS: Implementing the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface with Intel's Framework describes a set of robust architectural interfaces, implemented in C, that has been designed to enable the BIOS industry and Intel customers to accelerate the evolution of innovative, differentiated, computer platform designs. The Framework is Intel's recommended implementation of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification for computer platforms based on the Intel(r) Architecture. The EFI specification is an industry standard that defines a new model for the interface between operating systems and computing platform firmware and provides a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. Intended for BIOS developers, firmware designers, and software professionals, this book covers one of the most important new developments in computing platform evolution. Beyond BIOS: Implementing the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface with Intel's Framework provides the reader with solid examples of how to implement the EFI specification from booting a system based upon this technology to the constituent elements of building a platform with the Framework.Included is the rationale for design decisions, code fragments that implement the concepts, and samples from many different platforms. Each operating environment imposes different requirements on the system software. Operating system developers have learned that the successful support of a complex operating environment is the result of adaptation of existing basic software concepts to a new landscape. The reader of this book will learn how to use just such a strategy in turn to build pre-boot firmware and understand the new world of standards-based operating system booting.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974364908
• ISBN13: 9780974364902
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Intel Press
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An author's perspective

I thought I'd offer some insight on this book, particularly in light of a recently posted bad review that makes a bunch of criticisms that are quite wrong (I am pretty sure the review is due to a personal grudge held by someone who hasn't even read the book). First, the goal of this book is to be a reference people can use to find solutions for "doing it right", not an elementary text on secure coding principles that gives...

Voluminous and comprehensive

If you are interested in encryption, you should probably get Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, which is generally considered the standard summary of the field. But suppose you actually want to use some of the symmetric key or public key methods he describes? If you want to code from scratch, his book is a good starting point. But if you want to quickly avail yourself of the best existing methods and you don't want to...

best o'reilly book I've ever purchased

If you develop software, any kind of software, you need this book.The importance of understanding the security surrounding the development of software is finally being realized. This book provides a complete reference for the secure implementation of common operations that software developers often fail to do correctly.One of the best things about this book is that it covers so many topics that are often left out of secure...

Much more than I had expected, very good.

I hadn't anticipated the heavy amount of crypto related chapters in this book. I honestly had only read about the input validation, avoiding overflows, and access control portions. It turns out it covers those areas plus a wide range of crypto related code. It goes over the fundamentals of Symmetric Crypto in great detail, from simple base64 encoding to parallelizing Encryption and decryption in arbitrary modes. All of the...