A Model Design And Implmentaion Of Coprocessor System Based On EFI/Tiano

With rapid development of computer technology, the hardware performance of personal computers is also greatly improved. To fully utilize the benefit given by hardware enhancement, there is an increasing demand to develop firmware and software environment for personal computers.Because of its lack of compatibility, extensibility and interactivity, the traditional BIOS design becomes an obstacle of the development of future computer technology. To adjust to the development of next generation computer architecture, Intel corporation created EFI(Extensible Firmware Interface) and the corresponding Tiano architecture. Based on EFI/Tiano, UEFI(Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) will be the next generation of BIOS standard.Operating Systems and software applications are the other bottlenecks for fully utilizing next generation dual-core and multi-core technology. Current Operating Systems cannot effectively utilize dual-core or multi-core for paralleling computing, and most of applications available for personal computers are not aware of multi-core technology, as the result, the improvement of performance of personal computers is not satisfying.In order to further improve the performance of dual-core computer system, the thesis proposes a coprocessor model based on EFI utilizing dual-core and RPC technology. During the DXE stage of EFI boot process, the user Operating System is booted through IPI interrupt, and then the EFI system runs as a background server system and acts as a coprocessor handling RPC requests from the user Operating System. To increase the extensibility of the model, the thesis further designs a four-layered distributed architecture.As proved by the experiment result, with the coprocessor model, the performance of Dual-core computer system is improved comparing to that only running the user operating system.