Development of Firmware Support Package BIOS for Next Generation Processors

Abstract

This thesis mainly presents a discussion about the Firmware Support Package BIOS. In broader view, Firmware Support Package Basic Input Output System is the binary distribution of necessary Intel Silicon initialization code which provide access to programming information which is not publicly available. The research work described in the thesis is mainly focused on improving the performance of BIOS and flexibility to the users to use any open source boot loaders. Basically the BIOS in modern PCs is to initialize and test the system hardware components, and to load a boot loader or an operating system from a mass memory device which is used for silicon initialization. It act as a layer between OS and hardware to initialize and interface and finally loads boot loader to give control to OS and BIOS played supporting hardware role for the devices. The FSP provides chipset and processor initialization in a format that can easily be incorporated into many existing boot loaders. The first design goal of FSP is to provide access to the key programming information that is open source. The second design goal is to abstract the complexities of Intel Silicon initialization and expose a limited number of well-defined interfaces. A fundamental design philosophy is to provide the ubiquitously required silicon initialization code. As such, FSP will often provide only a subset of the products features. The next generation processors for FSP used to give better performance to the customers are Kabylake, Broxton and Apollolake which will release at the end of 2016. Mainly Kabylake and Apollolake are for PCs and Broxton is for tablet. So, by using FSP for next generation processors, Intel provides best solution to that customers who want to use open source bootloaders for particular BIOS.