Firmware development and upstream for a leading IP technology company
Business Problem
Our Client required UEFI firmware to be developed for all the hardware IPs (like PCIe, SMMU,TMU etc.) existing for two of the SoC’s. The requirement was also to add ACPI feature (which was not available in any of the hardware platform), to be added to UEFI.
Business Analysis
The hardware platform is based on NXP Coretex-A72 cores (LX2160A and LS1046A), which is widely used in industrial router, edge computing gateway, IP-PBX, energy management, automation, and other fields. UEFI becomes a mandatory requirement for desktop market and for hypervisor firmware. Only when UEFI compliance (like SBBR, SBSA) and conformance are fully tested, the UEFI can be used for running OS like WinPE and ESXi. The scope includes migrating the legacy firmware, based on U-Boot and the Linux kernel, to UEFI, and upstreaming the patches to the respective repositories.
PureSoftware Solution
PureSoftware provided a robust solution to meet the customer’s firmware requirements, delivering UEFI and ACPI support for NXP platforms (LX2160A and LS1046A). The comprehensive solution involved system level understanding of all the IPs, taking care of errata and performance aspects, device driver and baremetal programing, by following open-source coding guidelines of GitHub and underwent rigorous system testing on various hardware platforms. The team worked to revisit all the IPs as there was no such reference or implementation available to benchmark, and hence with continuous engagement with the client and feedback from maintainers, the solution was successfully implemented and uptreamed to respective repositories.
Results
This would enable any customer/ODM/OEM to develop a solution that requires multi-OS functionality to run on these hardware platforms, making the hardware platform ready for the desktop market.
This enables customer/ODM/OEM to support many industry applications.
