The purpose of this presentation is to approach the Pre-OS boot environment as a specialized function of code, execution time, and operational parameters of a computer system. The Pre-boot environment is often considered a component of the hardware by software engineering and a component of the software by the hardware community. In reality, it is the final bridge between the static real world hardware environment and the dynamic and virtual world of the operating system and applications.

The following topics will be discussed :

• The History of the Pre-boot environment (including BIOS – the early OS carry over of Pre-boot) • How hardware architecture and design impacts the boot process • The evolution from boot Rom to BIOS to UEFI (a new technology in pre-OS boot): • The future directions of Pre-boot in the PC and embedded industries (in conjunction with new technologies and UEFI)

Biography

Michael has over 25 years of embedded software, BIOS, and driver development experience. His education includes a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Computer Science. His current credentials include:

Current Chair of the Industry Communications Working Group of the UEFI and the Marketing Administrator of the EFI and Framework Open Source Community Website (at www.tianocore.org). While in the past, Michael has been the Chair of the I2O LAN Working group, adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia, a contributor to the EISA Specification, and inventor/co-inventor on 13 patents. Currently Michael is a Product Marketing Engineer with Intel SSG, where he is a champion for UEFI.

I have now been with SEVEN Networks almost two years and the hard reality is that I have not been able to apply more than a handful of things from 10 years of research in software testing. In this talk I will try to describe why this is and what makes testing in a fast paced internet-style startup so challenging. When SQL and EXCEL pivot tables are debugging aids and GREP, AWK, RRD and ORCA are your best friends in finding issues, you know you will not be publishing in any theoretical journals, but that is the reality of testing software in the internet age. In addition to exploring some of the more interesting errors we encountered I will discuss why load testing is essentially now the only form of automated testing we are engaging in.

Biography

Willem Visser obtained an M.Sc. from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa (1993) and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in the UK (1998). He spent 8 years at NASA Ames Research Center working mostly on testing Java software, and in particular, was one of the main developers of the Java PathFinder (JPF) model checker. In early 2007 he moved to SEVEN Networks, a small startup that provides mobile email solutions and counts SPRINT and ATT as two of their biggest customers. At SEVEN he is in charge of load testing, system monitoring and (increasingly) data mining.