The design methodology of viewing system firmware functionality as made up of two distinct phases – initialization and OS boot logic is gaining traction resulting in new implementations of system firmware. This approach calls for modular phases with an initialization phase (bootloader) which completes the system initialization and gets the hardware to a usable state and then a payload phase. The payload can provide/implement many different functionalities including the media and file system drivers, operating system boot, diagnostics, etc.

This topic presents the idea of a standardized interface that the bootloader exposes with the design goal of a platform independent payload.