Architecture Specification Intel® Platform Innovation Framework for UEFI

The Intel® Platform Innovation Framework for UEFI architecture specification describes the primary design elements of an innovative approach to constructing platform firmware for platforms based on Intel® architecture. The design is characterized by a central framework that provides services and infrastructure to combine modular software building block elements. Together, the infrastructure code, which is known as the foundation, and an appropriate selection of modular building blocks constitute a complete platform software implementation that is designed to initialize the platform and boot shrink-wrap operating systems or other custom application environments. The foundations are comprised of the pre-EFI initialization (PEI) and driver execution environment (DXE) phases, which are both described in this specification. In addition, this specification describes a number of other design elements in an effort to provide a complete set of baseline design and services support for arbitrary building blocks that will customize a particular platform firmware image to the hardware and the intended purpose and market for that hardware. These additional elements include such things as security services, boot device policy management, runtime services, afterlife, firmware storage, user interface, firmware integrity services, manageability support, legacy compatibility and boot/resume paths.

Interoperability and component specifications

These additional specifications describe in greater depth the functional components that complement the PEI and DXE foundations and that are also architectural in the framework design. Architectural in this context implies that the functional components provide services that may always be assumed to be present by any code designed and written to operate across a range of platforms that use firmware based on the framework design.

All specifications are available as PDF files. A zip file of all the PDF files is also available for download.