TianoCore EDK II (formerly Tiano) is the

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation o ...

UEFI UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of f ...

by Intel. EDK is the abbreviation for EFI Development Kit and is developed by the TianoCore community. TianoCore EDK II is the

de facto standard A ''de facto'' standard is a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (for example, by early entrance to the market). is a Latin phrase (literally " in fact"), here meaning "in practice b ...

generic UEFI services implementation.

History

In 2004, Intel released their "Foundation Code" of their EFI implementation using a

free license A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are wo ...

. This later evolved into EDK and EDK II, within the TianoCore community. EDK II was released in 2010 under the package known as "UEFI Development Kit" (UDK2010). Although EDK II implements the UEFI specification, it is not endorsed by the

UEFI Forum UEFI Forum, Inc. is an alliance between technology companies to coordinate the development of the UEFI specifications. The board of directors includes representatives from twelve ''promoter'' companies: AMD, American Megatrends, ARM, Apple, Dell ...

Projects

EDK II code has been integrated into other projects. A part of TianoCore is the UEFI shell. When a specific UEFI vendor does not support an UEFI shell feature, the UEFI shell from TianoCore can be used.

Coreboot

In 2013, project PIANO was merged into

coreboot coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and r ...

. It gained EDK II support in 2017.

Project Mu

Project Mu is a fork of EDK-II by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. It is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

release of the

core used in

Microsoft Surface Microsoft Surface is a series of touchscreen-based personal computers, tablets and interactive whiteboards designed and developed by Microsoft, running the Microsoft Windows operating system, apart from the Surface Duo, which runs on Android ...

and

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Win ...

products initiated by Microsoft in December 2018. The project promotes the idea of Firmware as a Service. The project was started to replace TianoCore's edk2 implementation to improve quality tests of the competing open source UEFI core.

EFIDroid

EFIDroid is a bootloader for Android devices based on Snapdragon processors that is based on EDK-II.

References

External links

Official website

EDK II GitHub repository
*{{Github, https://github.com/Microsoft/mu Free BIOS implementations Firmware Custom firmware Software related to embedded Linux Software using the BSD license Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in C++