Automatic BIOS Code Generation

Abstract

Today, the complexity of the computer systems has grown, with processors and chipsets incorporating millions of the transistors and compatible with dozens of operating system,hundreds of platform components and thousands of hardware devices and software applications. Hence the complexity of BIOS source code is increased so it is hard to develop different BIOS for each type of platform with different favors. Also every generation of processor (RTL) is accompanied by an XML file that consists of entire register set details for that chip. For each generation of an Silicon(IC chip), there are many avors of its layouts each accompanied by a specific xml file. As and when the layout changes even slightly, there are few registers among thousands of registers that might change. Currently, programmers have to manually type in the details of all the registers in their code as part of header files and source files. Therefore, whenever there is a new version of xml file, even though only few register details would have changed, tracing them and logging them to update the code is dificult. Doing it multiple times is time consuming and prone to errors. This project is aimed at generating the Silicon initialization code from Silicon RTL XML using Silicon and feature specific configuration overrides with minimal manual intervention.