Welcome to the dark corner of BIOS reverse engineering, code injection and various modification techniques only deemed by those immensely curious about BIOS

Friday, January 25, 2013

Gizmo Board (AMD G-series APU)

Has anyone play with this thing: http://www.gizmosphere.org/why-gizmo/ ? It's very interesting because it uses Coreboot out of the box instead of Legacy-BIOS/UEFI. Well, I'm not sure whether it's possible to use UEFI as it's payload or not (Coreboot support UEFI as its payload).

But from embedded development point of view, just boot straight to Linux from Coreboot ;-). Linux drivers will take care of the rest of system initialization. The interesting thing is, the kit also provides an "explansion" board to tap into the I/O of the x64 system (the AMD G-Series APU), well, I exagerrated a bit, I meant you could hook directly to the I/O which very probably connects to the "southbridge" of the entire system.

Anyway, from pure raw performance point-of-view, this is a real raw power  monster to play with. But, I'm not sure how it compares to BeagleBoard when playing with signal processing. But surely for computer vision stuff, it's certainly very powerful given that OpenCV is tuned for x86 (x64?) architecture by default.

I think it's also an interesting platform to play with Coreboot and to understand the inner working of modern day x86/x64 processor.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

UEFI EDK II on ARM (BeagleBoard) and My Next Article

I haven't been checking out TianoCore for a while and when I did, I stumbled upon this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?title=BeagleBoardPkg. It's an interesting proposition for UEFI-on-ARM research and the likes. 

As for the next article, I'm still looking for a suitable EFI Option ROM to work with. My previous candidates didn't live-up to expectation as they were quite unworkable given the free time I have to work on the article. 

Stay tuned.