Sunday, June 28, 2015

Firmware-related blogs

This short post describes some firmware-related blogs, including this one. Does talking about one's own blog make this a meta-blog posting, or given the pain in getting through this read along w/ the subject matter of firmware make it a 'flog' (firmware + blog)? Just kidding.

So to begin, I started this blog in 2009 to discuss recent events in UEFI and PI. One of my favorite UEFI-related sites on blogger is Tim Lewis' http://uefi.blogspot.com. I've worked with Tim for over a decade and he is one of the most talent software engineers and architects in the field. When I bumped into Tim at the Open Compute Project conference in San Jose, I asked why he hasn't blogged since October of last year. His reply was 'When I get deep into a programming project, I forget to blog', or something like that. As such, as always, expect to see good things from Tim in the future.

Since starting my blog in 2009 I have expanded a bit in both the subject matter and the length. Recently I started posting at https://firmware.intel.com/blog/ on subjects directly related to that site. I try to elide opinions and other matter from that blog stream and stick to subjects closely related to UEFI, PI, coreboot, and other topics hosted on http://firmware.intel.com. Since I don't have write-access to the wiki's on http://www.tianocore.org, I typically beg someone to post a note for me on http://tianocore.sourceforge.net/wiki/SecurityPkg. It's easier for me to go to the firmware blog and post entries like https://firmware.intel.com/blog/security-technologies-and-minnowboard-max

On the Intel front, you'll see that fellow Intel colleague & blogger Brian Richardson from the above blogging site also has an evangelist blog at https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/author/brichar2/ When last in the Seattle area Brian stopped by my house; I don't know if he appreciated the story I related later wherein my teen-age daughter asked me "why was Kurt Cobain visiting you, Dad?" 

Another site that I follow is relatively new. Its author harkens from the Pacific Northwest and I met him at the Black Lodge back in 2013 https://twitter.com/vincentzimmer/status/381940011974656000/photo/1. His site is http://firmwaresecurity.com/ and as the masthead notes, it is "a blog focused on hardware/firmware security news/info for BIOS, UEFI, and Coreboot, on Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Chrome, and other OSes." Although the site also treats OS's, it has a rich feed of stories on firmware.

Other firmware sites closely related to UEFI and PI includes William Leara's "Basic Input/Output" http://www.basicinputoutput.com/. "Beyond BIOS" (oh the pun hurts this morning), the coreboot community has an interesting blog stream I follow at http://blogs.coreboot.org/, and the commercial coreboot entity Sage Engineering's Jeff Thomas has an interesting set of postings at https://www.se-eng.com/author/sagejeff/

Another rich set of blog postings on BIOS and firmware can be reached via http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/. The blogger is also the author of http://www.amazon.com/BIOS-Disassembly-Ninjutsu-Uncovered/dp/1931769605 which sits nearby on a bookshelf crowded by the hefty Stevens TCP/IP series and ancient computer architecture books by Organick and Levy.

Although not a blog, I have followed Jack Ganssle's e-newletter http://www.ganssle.com/tem-subunsub.html on embedded for years. And although the subject matter is more trusted computing than firmware, I like the community postings of Chris Maher on http://www.linkedin.com since there are often cross-overs of firmware and trusted computing in his citations.

Twitter http://www.twitter.com also has a rich set of news on firmware, but it's difficult to filter signal from noise on that site. I've been accused of being one of those noise generators at time, too https://twitter.com/vincentzimmer. Accounts like https://twitter.com/uefibios and https://twitter.com/coreboot are obvious postings to follow.

I hope that these locations help in your hunt of interesting reads regarding firmware on the internet. If you have a favorite site that I missed, please send me a mail or comment on this blog. Remember on the internet that 'sharing is caring.'

Cheers

1 comment:

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