METHOD OF PROVISIONING FIRMWARE IN AN OPERATING SYSTEM (OS) ABSENT SERVICES ENVIRONMENT

• Main Authors: BAILEY, ABDUL M, ZIMMER, VINCENT, EDWARDS, JAMES W, KHANNA, RAHUL, LI, YU FU, TANG, DI
• Format: Patent
• Language: English; French; German
• Published: 21.01.2015
• Subjects: CALCULATING; CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION TECHNOLOGIES IN INFORMATION ANDCOMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES [ICT], I.E. INFORMATION ANDCOMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AIMING AT THE REDUCTION OF THIR OWNENERGY USE; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; GENERAL TAGGING OF CROSS-SECTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES SPANNING OVER SEVERAL SECTIONS OF THE IPC; GENERAL TAGGING OF NEW TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS; PHYSICS; TECHNICAL SUBJECTS COVERED BY FORMER USPC CROSS-REFERENCE ART COLLECTIONS [XRACs] AND DIGESTS; TECHNOLOGIES OR APPLICATIONS FOR MITIGATION OR ADAPTATION AGAINSTCLIMATE CHANGE

Methods and apparatuses for re-instantiating a firmware environment that includes one or more firmware functions available at pre-boot time when transitioning the computing device from a first, higher power consumption state to a second, lower power consumption state. The firmware environment determines whether a cryptographic signature on a firmware volume is verified; whether hardware resources of the computing device requested by a manifest of the firmware volume are available; and whether a firmware module of the firmware volume is compatible with installed firmware of the firmware environment. If so, the firmware environment reserves space in a memory to accommodate resources used by the firmware module, and executes the firmware module with the computing device in the second, lower power consumption state.