Brian Gosselin, Tom Niemela and Lindsay R. Vega
Insyde Technology and Intel

In detective stories, you follow the money. In code, you follow the interface. Unfortunately, in modern code, developers are still tripping over the traditional, old school BIOS on their way to initializing their boards. This paper introduces Intel's innovative new concept in BIOS: the Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). This is a modular, platform-independent architecture that can perform boot and other BIOS functions. It is driver-based, so developers can do binary linking. It is also C-based, clean, scalable, and modular across different companies. It offers IA-32, Intel Itanium- and XScale-technology applicability, all in a single source tree.

This paper concludes with an indroduction to InsydeH2O a "Hardware-2-Operating System" firmware solution that is a complete implementation of the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI and represents the next-generation of BIOS technology being used on Server, Desktop, Mobile and Embedded PC architected platforms.