We have Tianocore for PCs and U-Boot for embedded systems. Both of these support EFI and can boot common Linux distros. So are we done now, with firmware and booting?
In fact we are just getting started on the road to genuinely open firmware and boot. EFI was designed in the 1990s for a closed-source environment. It has resulted in growing intermediation between firmware and the OS, with lots of code and complexity which is not really useful in an open source world. The good news is that we have a lot of the pieces in place to move to the next step.
This talk examines the process of assembling firmware and booting an OS, looking at how EFI handles these elements and the design decisions that led us here. It then proposes a set of incremental improvements leading towards a more open, straightforward and performant boot.
It ends with a demo contrasting the status quo with this new approach, including boot time, code size and security.
Simon Glass has worked in embedded systems for many years, at ARM, Bluewater Systems (which he founded) and Google. He is a primary contributor to U-Boot and custodian of its driver model, with around 10000 commits in total. Simon is married with three children and lives in Colorado.