Conan for UEFI??

June 27, 2018 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

An open source, secure, vendor-neutral, pre-OS packaging tool for updating platform microcode and firmware might be interesting. So when I saw this UEFI test app:

https://github.com/matlo607/uefi-test

it was interesting to note that it includes some support for the Conan C/C++ packaging tool for UEFI, eg:

https://github.com/matlo607/uefi-test/blob/master/conan-recipes/edk2/conanfile.py

I’ve no time today to study it closely, so I’m unsure if it is using conan as an OS-present tool, or it has conan running as a pre-OS UEFI app. Big difference! 🙂

Conan is a C/C++ packaging tool. The official docs don’t mention UEFI support:

Conan can be installed in many Operating Systems. It has been extensively used and tested in Windows, Linux (different distros), OSX, and is also actively used in FreeBSD and Solaris SunOS. There are also several additional operating systems on which it has been reported to work. […] Conan works and is being actively used on Windows, Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, ArchLinux, Raspbian), OSX, FreeBSD, and SunOS, and, as it is portable, it might work in any other platform that can run python. In the documentation, examples for a specific OS might be found, such as conan install . -s compiler=”Visual Studio”, which will be specific for Windows users. If on a different system, the reader should adapt to their own platform and settings (for example conan install . -s compiler=gcc). […] Also conan works with any build system. In the documentation, CMake will be widely used, because it is portable and well known. But conan does not depend on CMake at all; it is not a requirement. Conan is totally orthogonal to the build system. There are some utilities that improve the usage of popular build systems such as CMake or Autotools, but they are just helpers. Furthermore, it is not necessary that all the packages are built with the same build system. It is possible to depend on packages created with other build system than the one you are using to build your project.

https://github.com/conan-io/conan
https://conan.io/

PS: Above project uses CMake, and Conan supports CMake. And there’s also this CMake/UEFI project, but appears to not be native UEFI use of CMake:

https://firmwaresecurity.com/2016/02/07/uefi-virtualbox-tutorial/
https://github.com/eruffaldi/uefiboot
http://teslacore.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-with-uefi-with-cmake-and.html

UEFI VirtualBox tutorial

February 7, 2016 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

There’s another new Github project related to UEFI, this one is a turorial using UEFI undre VirtualBox. Most use of virtualized UEFI occurs under QEMU, but VirtualBox also supports UEFI’s OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware) format, so it is nice to see more documentation on using UEFI with VirtualBox, not only QEMU.

Tutorial on making UEFI with CMake and VirtualBox

UEFI Bare Bone Exercise

by Emanuele Ruffaldi using CMake,mxe and VirtualBox/Qemu

Related instructiosn from OSDEV: http://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI_Bare_Bones Other related project (Make+QEmu): – https://github.com/tqh/efi-example – http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-programming/hello.html

Requirements:
* GCC Cross Compiler x86_64-w64-mingw32. MXE is fine
* MTools
* GNU-efi

[…]

https://github.com/eruffaldi/uefiboot

AMD releases clSPARSE library

August 7, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this week, Kent Knox of AMD announced the beta release of a new library on their blog.

The clSPARSE library, created by AMD in partnership with Vratis Ltd., is an open source sparse linear algebra library that uses OpenCL(TM) to accelerate performance with GPU Compute. clSPARSE expands upon exiting the clMathLibraries offerings: dense clBLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), clFFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and clRNG (random number generator), and adds new sparse operations:

* Sparse matrix – dense vector multiply (SpM-dV)
* Sparse matrix – dense matrix multiply
* Iterative conjugate gradient (CG) solver
* Iterative biconjugate gradient stabilized (BiCGStab) solver
* Dense to Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) conversions (and converse)
* Coordinate list (COO) to CSR conversions (and converse)
* Functions to read matrix market files

clSPARSE contains optimized kernels that compute on matrices represented in CSR (Compressed Sparse Row) format. The library provides conversion routines to and from the CSR compressed matrix format, and is the required sparse matrix format to use the SpM-dV multiply, CG or the BiCGStab solvers. clSPARSE exports a C interface which allows developers to build wrappers around clSPARSE in any language they need. This means users do not have to write sparse OpenCL kernels to gain the performance benefits of sparse GPU acceleration. OpenCL fluency is still required. The implementation is abstracted, allowing you to focus on memory placement and transport.

This new AMD open source library uses the ASFv2 (Apache Software Foundation) license, and uses the CMake build tool.

More Information:

http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2015/08/05/clsparse-beta-released/