Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and health concerns, the Spring 2020 UEFI Plugfest has been rescheduled for Oct. 26 – 30, 2020 at the Embassy Suites in Hillsboro, Oregon. In place of the Spring Plugfest, the UEFI 2020 Virtual Plugfest will now take place online through a series of themed educational webinars presented by UEFI Forum members. The webinars will be free and open to the public.
Recordings of the webinars will be available after the presentations have concluded. If you register now but are unable to attend the live presentation, you can view the presentation recording on the UEFI Forum YouTube channel after the webinar has concluded.
Upcoming Webinars:
JTAG-Based UEFI Debug and Trace
Tuesday, July 14, 2020 from 8:00 am – 8:45 am PT
The IEEE Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) standards define debug, test and hardware validation technologies that are ingrained within much of today’s commercial silicon. In particular, platform debug is enabled by JTAG-based run-control (for example: halt, go, set breakpoint, single-step) and trace (for example: instruction trace, real-time UEFI “tool-hosted printf” message trace). On many systems, JTAG-based debugging is typically available from the very first instruction after CPU reset, allowing it to assist with development of early boot software that runs before any device or bus is initialized.
This presentation will provide examples on the utility of JTAG-based UEFI debug and trace on x86 platforms.
Register for the webinar: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/18206/421322
Microsoft’s Continued Advancements in the UEFI Ecosystem
Wednesday, July 15, 2020 from 8:00 am – 9:00 am PT
The webinar will include a summary of Microsoft’s continued investments into the business-critical UEFI ecosystem. This will include open source tools to improve developer efficiency (allowing more time for testing), open source continuous integration and unit testing in TianoCore, and an exploration of the “Code First” model including several case studies of new Windows features built upon open source Project Mu’s EDK2-based code, tests, & documentation.
Register for the webinar: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/18206/421325.
Future Webinar Topics Include:
- Best Practices for Secure Firmware Patching
- Enabling Rust for UEFI Firmware
- Driver Development with EDKII
- Implementing and Using the UEFI Key Management Service (KMS)
Past Webinars:
TrenchBoot and GRUB - A Quick Introduction
Tuesday, June 16
TrenchBoot is a cross-community OSS integration project for hardware-rooted, late launch integrity of open and proprietary systems. It reduces the attack surface exposed by the platform firmware. The presentation will introduce the TrenchBoot itself and later discuss how it compares to a UEFI secure boot and where it complements the secure boot. The webinar will also explore various challenges created by the UEFI environment for TrenchBoot but also for DRTM in general. Then the presentation will highlight some solutions to the discovered deficiencies discussed in the OSS community.
LinuxBoot Integration with UEFI Host Firmware
Wednesday, June 17
This webinar introduces LinuxBoot, its integration into host firmware solutions, provides current status and makes a proposal on how the UEFI firmware industry could embrace the challenges and opportunities that alternative firmware approaches introduce.
Compute Express Link (CXL): Proposed Enhancements to UEFI and ACPI Specifications
Tuesday, May 19 from 8:00 am – 8:45 am PT
Compute Express Link (CXL) is a new high-speed CPU-to-Device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect designed to accelerate next-generation data center performance. CXL is designed to be an industry open standard interface for high-speed communications, as accelerators and memory expanders are increasingly used to complement CPUs in support of emerging applications. The CXL 1.1 specification is already available, with work on future versions underway. CXL reinforces the need for standardization, with focus on technologies such as UEFI, ACPI and PCIe to provide the necessary interfaces between the firmware and the operating systems to support CXL new use cases of accelerators and memory expansion across different implementations. This presentation will first briefly introduce CXL 1.1 standard. It will then delve into the technical details of the proposed enhancements to the UEFI and ACPI specifications required for operating systems to manage CXL devices and ports in a system.
Building a System That “Just Works” – Arm Firmware Ecosystem
Wednesday, May 20 from 8:00 am – 9:00 am PT
This webinar will provide an overview of the market reality of the boot system firmware on Arm systems, from servers to edge devices. It covers the range of firmware standards available for those systems, including Arm Trusted Firmware, SBBR (UEFI/ACPI), EBBR (UEFI on top of uboot), as well as LinuxBoot. The session also covers the evolution of the Arm firmware standards and the ServerReady program around UEFI and ACPI to design systems that “just work”, regardless of the segment.