UEFI Secure Booting FreeBSD with Dasharo firmware
Published at November 14, 2024 · Filip Lewiński · 8 min read
This blogpost is a very brief introduction to the UEFI Secure Boot. It focuses on enabling Secure Boot on FreeBSD, on the example of a device running Dasharo firmware....
Implementing UEFI Secure Boot on MPL PIP4x
Published at April 18, 2024 · Paweł Langowski · 12 min read
This post explains how we tackled the problem of implementing UEFI Secure Boot on MPL's PIP platforms. The process included testing the platform's compatibility with Secure Boot and integrating automatic image signing into an existing Yocto layer....
Optimizing Firmware Updates: Dasharo Firmware Update Mode for NovaCustom Laptops
Published at November 7, 2023 · Michał Kopeć · 5 min read
Updating your firmware is an important part of keeping your device secure and reliable. Making this process as easy and reliable as possible is, therefore, a big focus for Dasharo. In this article, we'll dive into the latest feature that makes the update process on NovaCustom laptops a bit easier, more user-friendly, and talk about where we want to go from here....
Categories: firmware
Reasonably secure way to update your system firmware
Published at September 18, 2020 · Norbert Kamiński · 3 min read
As you may know from the previous blog post, the qubes-fwupd is the wrapper that allows you to update the firmware of your devices in the Qubes OS. This time I will briefly describe the new features, whereby you will securely update your system firmware....
Installing TrenchBoot in UEFI environments
Published at May 6, 2020 · Michał Żygowski · 17 min read
This blog post will show you how to install NixOS on UEFI platforms and how to install TrenchBoot on them....
Building UEFI based firmware on MinnowBoard
Published at March 28, 2018 · Bartek Pastudzki · 8 min read
Building coreboot on well supported platform such as Bay Trail is quite straightforward task, however we need to remember about some things in order to have coreboot working. First of all we need to provide up-to-date microcode and FSP (Firmware Support Package), which are not included in coreboot source tree and coreboot build system won’t complain about it. Second thing is that Bay Trail has TXE firmware on the same ROM as boot firmware so we have to make sure that we won’t corrupt it because it would brick the platform....
Categories: firmware
Flashing MinnowBoard Turbot with Raspberry Pi Zero W
Published at November 20, 2017 · Piotr Król · 10 min read
Recently we started preparation of coreboot training for one of our customers. Our platform of choice for that training is MinnowBoard Turbot. There are couple reasons for that: During training we can show recent firmware trends - despite we don’t like blobs (FSP, AGESA, PSP, ME etc.) and bloated designs (UEFI) we cannot escape reality and have to show customers how to deal with those components. MinnowBoard Turbot use couple of them, but also supports coreboot....
Categories: firmware
UEFI/EDK II CorebootPayloadPkg on PC Engines apu2
Published at November 3, 2017 · Piotr Król · 9 min read
Recently we were reached by person interested in running CoreOS on apu2. CoreOS is a very interesting system from security point of view. It was created to support containers and scalability out of the box. Unfortunately it requires firmware supporting GPT. At that point I was not sure if I can utilize GRUB GPT support on apu2, but this led to other questions: Is it possible to boot UEFI-aware OS on PC Engines apux boards?...
Categories: firmware
FWTS on ARMv8 platform (HiKey LeMaker version) from scratch
Published at July 25, 2016 · Piotr Król · 8 min read
This is second post from series about LeMaker version of HiKey board from 96boards Customer Edition family. Previous post focused on describing hardware part. In this post I would like to show how to setup firmware development and testing environment. This post highly rely on 96boards documentation, so kudos to 96boards and LeMaker for providing lot of information for developers. Obtain pre-compiled binaries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 wget https://builds....
Categories: firmware
Powering on LeMaker HiKey (ARMv8)
Published at May 19, 2016 · Piotr Król · 4 min read
Embedded Systems Consultants have chance to live in interesting times. ARM expansion touch server market and UEFI coming to non-x86 platforms. Firmware gaining its importance and because handling real development is harder and harder lot of things starting to happen in open source. Big players trying to address security and virtualization issues, what leads to really interesting features in recent SoCs. Couple weeks ago I decided to recover my knowledge about UEFI and take a look how it is implemented for architecture that have its momentum - namely ARM in its 8 version (ARMv8)....
Categories: firmware
UEFI Application development in OVMF
Published at November 21, 2015 · Piotr Król · 3 min read
OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware) is a project that aim is to enable UEFI support in various virtual machines. According to whitepaper various projects have interest in supporting OVFM ie. VirtualBox, Xen, BHyVe and of course QEMU. Why someone may be interested in OVMF ? IMHO the most important reason is that OVMF give ability to develop UEFI applications without using real hardware. This speeds up development cycle by giving ability to start before hardware prototype arrive....
Categories: firmware
UEFI from Linux enthusiast perspective
Published at January 15, 2012 · Piotr Król · 2 min read
Another interesting topic with which I am dealing with recently is the UEFI. As we read on wikipedia: “The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.". The purpose of this specification is to create something what in the future fully replace the BIOS. Of course, as always in such a situation, I wonder what OpenSource and Linux gurus have to say....
Categories: miscellaneous
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