#UEFI

Optimizing Firmware Updates: Dasharo Firmware Update Mode for NovaCustom Laptops

Published at November 7, 2023 · Michał Kopeć ·  5 min read

Updating your firmware is an important part of keeping your device secure and reliable. Making this process as easy and reliable as possible is, therefore, a big focus for Dasharo. In this article, we'll dive into the latest feature that makes the update process on NovaCustom laptops a bit easier, more user-friendly, and talk about where we want to go from here....

Categories: firmware




Building UEFI based firmware on MinnowBoard

Published at March 28, 2018 · Bartek Pastudzki ·  8 min read

Building coreboot on well supported platform such as Bay Trail is quite straightforward task, however we need to remember about some things in order to have coreboot working. First of all we need to provide up-to-date microcode and FSP (Firmware Support Package), which are not included in coreboot source tree and coreboot build system won’t complain about it. Second thing is that Bay Trail has TXE firmware on the same ROM as boot firmware so we have to make sure that we won’t corrupt it because it would brick the platform....

Categories: firmware


Flashing MinnowBoard Turbot with Raspberry Pi Zero W

Published at November 20, 2017 · Piotr Król ·  10 min read

Recently we started preparation of coreboot training for one of our customers. Our platform of choice for that training is MinnowBoard Turbot. There are couple reasons for that: During training we can show recent firmware trends - despite we don’t like blobs (FSP, AGESA, PSP, ME etc.) and bloated designs (UEFI) we cannot escape reality and have to show customers how to deal with those components. MinnowBoard Turbot use couple of them, but also supports coreboot....

Categories: firmware


UEFI/EDK II CorebootPayloadPkg on PC Engines apu2

Published at November 3, 2017 · Piotr Król ·  9 min read

Recently we were reached by person interested in running CoreOS on apu2. CoreOS is a very interesting system from security point of view. It was created to support containers and scalability out of the box. Unfortunately it requires firmware supporting GPT. At that point I was not sure if I can utilize GRUB GPT support on apu2, but this led to other questions: Is it possible to boot UEFI-aware OS on PC Engines apux boards?...

Categories: firmware


FWTS on ARMv8 platform (HiKey LeMaker version) from scratch

Published at July 25, 2016 · Piotr Król ·  8 min read

This is second post from series about LeMaker version of HiKey board from 96boards Customer Edition family. Previous post focused on describing hardware part. In this post I would like to show how to setup firmware development and testing environment. This post highly rely on 96boards documentation, so kudos to 96boards and LeMaker for providing lot of information for developers. Obtain pre-compiled binaries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 wget https://builds....

Categories: firmware


Powering on LeMaker HiKey (ARMv8)

Published at May 19, 2016 · Piotr Król ·  4 min read

Embedded Systems Consultants have chance to live in interesting times. ARM expansion touch server market and UEFI coming to non-x86 platforms. Firmware gaining its importance and because handling real development is harder and harder lot of things starting to happen in open source. Big players trying to address security and virtualization issues, what leads to really interesting features in recent SoCs. Couple weeks ago I decided to recover my knowledge about UEFI and take a look how it is implemented for architecture that have its momentum - namely ARM in its 8 version (ARMv8)....

Categories: firmware


UEFI Application development in OVMF

Published at November 21, 2015 · Piotr Król ·  3 min read

OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware) is a project that aim is to enable UEFI support in various virtual machines. According to whitepaper various projects have interest in supporting OVFM ie. VirtualBox, Xen, BHyVe and of course QEMU. Why someone may be interested in OVMF ? IMHO the most important reason is that OVMF give ability to develop UEFI applications without using real hardware. This speeds up development cycle by giving ability to start before hardware prototype arrive....

Categories: firmware


UEFI from Linux enthusiast perspective

Published at January 15, 2012 · Piotr Król ·  2 min read

Another interesting topic with which I am dealing with recently is the UEFI. As we read on wikipedia: “The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.". The purpose of this specification is to create something what in the future fully replace the BIOS. Of course, as always in such a situation, I wonder what OpenSource and Linux gurus have to say....

Categories: miscellaneous