Confused about Tianocore EDK

[devsau]

After several years of putting off developing a efi/uefi bootloader for my os, I have tried to stop my procrastination and get to work. Ill be honest, maybe it's a bad morning for me or my reading comprehension skills aren't up to par, but I spent quite awhile looking over the tianocore edk.

A friend of mine was telling me it will work on any uefi board but that does not sound entirely accurate, i thought it was somewhere along the lines of coreboot. I also read over the intel edk debug kit, and since my board has a com db9 header (which is how I debug my os) that I should be good to go.

Here is where I am confused, is tianocore it's own bootloader that then sets up it's own pre-boot uefi environment on top of the already existing board firmware? Or am I completely missing the point.

If someone could point me in the direction of where a complete beginner would get started that would be fantastic. Like I said I have all the documentation, I am just a little overwhelmed and lost in the sauce.

[Combuster]

It's a full set of UEFI firmware. You load it instead of the legacy BIOS. (old instructions - only seems to work for the 32-bit bios)

[Brynet-Inc]

TianoCore is an umbrella project, it contains Intel's reference UEFI implementation and an SDK (EDK2) that can be used to compile standalone EFI programs and bootloaders. The SDK also contains example programs like the EFI Shell.

[devsau]

So if I wanted to debug (using the intel udk) I would essentially then need a board that supports coreboot? I assume this cant be run on any board.

[Brynet-Inc]

So if I wanted to debug (using the intel udk) I would essentially then need a board that supports coreboot? I assume this cant be run on any board.

No, you're the only person that's mentioned coreboot.

The coreboot project is a replacement firmware for motherboards, it can use a legacy BIOS payload (seabios) or possibly the tianocore reference implementation (..which lacks motherboard specific initialization code itself).

Unless you flash coreboot, your motherboard is likely to contain a different UEFI or BIOS implementation.

EDIT: Hmm, so apparently UDK is firmware based on Intel's reference implementation, probably used on Intel's own boards.. I don't know anything about the debugging facilities in the firmware or the UDK utilities.