Welcome to the dark corner of BIOS reverse engineering, code injection and various modification techniques only deemed by those immensely curious about BIOS

Sunday, November 22, 2009

TianoCore, UEFI and Coreboot

After a short glimpse over several mainstream BIOS binaries from several different motherboards, I came to conclusion that the move to UEFI is basically a slow incremental process. I think that most mainstream BIOS binaries at least still have the "compatibility mode code", which is a code path to "legacy BIOS" code, i.e. the BIOS code used in say Award 6.00PG or early AMIBIOS 8 base code. On the other hand TianoCore has not been much adopted outside of Intel. It's because some (if not most) relevant industry players view it as moving too fast and doesn't have stable code base. I don't think it has a stable "API" yet for others to "hook" their specific functions into it. Coreboot is in an entirely different league. I love the structure of Coreboot, only 16 machine code instructions prior to flat Protected Mode. This explains its fast boot time compared to the competition. However, for the time being Coreboot is geared more toward computing clusters and embedded industrial boards. I haven't dig too deep into Coreboot for a better judgement. More on it later.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

AMI BIOS Reverse Engineering Article

My AMI BIOS Reverse Engineering article is available online now: http://sites.google.com/site/pinczakko/pinczakko-s-guide-to-ami-bios-reverse-engineering-1 Might want to read it Anyway, it's much more condensed than the Award BIOS RE article. Well, this is part of my English edition book. I decided to release it because the NDA has been lifted. Note: Some of today's AMI BIOS binary used segment 4000h instead of 2771h for the "POST entry point" in the system BIOS even though all of them use the same AMIBIOS8 code base. The BIOS dissected in my article dates back to circa 2005, some changes happened since then.