[This is not fresh news. Since this is a new blog, I’m starting to work backward on some noteworthy news/releases that happened shortly before the blog started…]
Mid-2014, Red Hat released a whitepaper documenting the UEFI OVMF format. It is well-written, and useful for those new to UEFI, coming from a Linux background. The document is Copyright (C) 2014-2015, Red Hat, Inc., licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Abstract: The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is designed to replace the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface. Hardware platform vendors have been increasingly adopting the UEFI Specification to govern their boot firmware developments. OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware), a sub-project of Intel’s EFI Development Kit II (edk2), enables UEFI support for Ia32 and X64 Virtual Machines. This paper reports on the status of the OVMF project, treats features and limitations, gives end-user hints, and examines some areas in-depth.
Keywords: ACPI, boot options, CSM, edk2, firmware, flash, fw_cfg, KVM, memory map, non-volatile variables, OVMF, PCD, QEMU, reset vector, S3, Secure Boot, Smbios, SMM, TianoCore, UEFI, VBE shim, Virtio
Read the whitepaper:
http://people.redhat.com/~lersek/ovmf-whitepaper-c770f8c.txt
Firmware Security 