Tianocore

Tianocore is an open-source project that provides an implementation of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and serves as a reference firmware platform. Central to Tianocore is the EFI Development Kit II (EDK II), a modular codebase that includes drivers, libraries, and tools for building UEFI firmware across architectures such as x86, x64, ARM, and ARM64. The project covers the main UEFI initialization stack, including the Pre-EFI Initialization (PEI) and Driver Execution Environment (DXE) phases, the Boot Device Selection (BDS) process, OS loaders, and utilities such as the UEFI shell and boot manager. It is used both as a standalone open-source firmware and as a component within other firmware projects.

Origin and governance of Tianocore trace back to Intel, where the EFI work was initially developed under the name Tiano. The open-source project Tianocore was created to encapsulate and evolve this work through community contributions and collaboration with hardware vendors and the UEFI Forum. The codebase is publicly hosted and maintained, with the project’s documentation and resources available on tianocore.org. The EDK II code is distributed primarily under BSD-3-Clause and ISC licenses, with some components under additional open-source licenses in alignment with open standards.

Usage and impact of Tianocore extend beyond traditional desktops and servers. It is widely used as the open-source firmware foundation for UEFI on many platforms, and in virtualization environments via OVMF, the UEFI firmware for QEMU/KVM. It can function as a payload for other boot firmware projects such as Coreboot, providing a standardized and extensible UEFI interface for platform initialization and OS booting.

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