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Microsoft Announces Project Mu, an Open-Source Release of the UEFI Core (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft has a new open source project -- Project Mu. This is the company's open-source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core which is currently used by Surface devices and Hyper-V. With the project, Microsoft hopes to make it easier to build scalable and serviceable firmware, and it embraces the idea of Firmware as a Service (FaaS). This allows for fast and efficient updating of firmware after release, with both security patches and performance-enhancing updates.
FaaS is something that Microsoft has already enabled on Surface, but the company realized that TianoCore -- the existing open-source implementation of UEFI -- was not optimized for rapid servicing. This is where Project Mu can help, the company says. "Mu is built around the idea that shipping and maintaining a UEFI product is an ongoing collaboration between numerous partners. For too long the industry has built products using a 'forking' model combined with copy/paste/rename and with each new product the maintenance burden grows to such a level that updates are near impossible due to cost and risk," the company said.
FaaS is something that Microsoft has already enabled on Surface, but the company realized that TianoCore -- the existing open-source implementation of UEFI -- was not optimized for rapid servicing. This is where Project Mu can help, the company says. "Mu is built around the idea that shipping and maintaining a UEFI product is an ongoing collaboration between numerous partners. For too long the industry has built products using a 'forking' model combined with copy/paste/rename and with each new product the maintenance burden grows to such a level that updates are near impossible due to cost and risk," the company said.
I fully agree with Microsoft that UEFI has a forking problem. But that is caused by the fact that BIOS vendors take tianocore as a baseline and extend it. The root of the issue is that tianocore itself does not provide a complete UEFI firmware implementation, it gets about 40% of the way there and expects the Silicon vendors (Intel, AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc.) and BIOS vendors (AMI, Phoenix, Insyde, Biosoft, etc.) to fill in the rest with proprietary code. This problem is actually almost identical to the Android fragmentation problem. But really what Microsoft has done here is create another fork for their Surface products.
The good thing is that Microsoft has open sourced a lot of that fork and have pushed the percentage forward from 40% to maybe 50 or 60%. If you look at what they have released though it is very customized for Surface... they have come up with their own answers for a lot of stuff that the UEFI specification already has answers for; the BIOS setup menu/HII database being the most notable. The percentage gained could be much higher if they didn't insist on duplicating code already in tianocore just because they think they know better. Separately, the tianocore guys are also trying to solve the fragmentation problem. A complete open source UEFI firmware implementation is under development right now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform I am one of the active contributors to tianocore. It is my hope that if Microsoft is truly interested in trying to solve the fragmentation problem that they are willing to work with tianocore and contribute to it instead of building their own competing open source community.
The one thing that all of us should keep an eye on is the potential for a Microsoft attempt to use the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program to force every PC on the planet to use MU. Creating a firmware mono-culture would give Microsoft much more control over the PC industry than Windows itself already affords them. They could turn every PC into nothing more than a Surface with a different OEM logo on the lid. It's certainly one way of solving UEFI's forking issue, but it would significantly strengthen the walled garden they are trying to build with Windows 10 at the same time.