Since that page is a little dense, the higher-level version: PCI supports Option ROMs (OpRoms) - plug in device like a NIC or a GPU, your BIOS actually loads compiled code from it and executes it on the CPU. In many systems for example PXE booting (net booting) is actually a function of the NIC, executing code on the CPU to load an operating system. We're talking actual x86/x86_64 machine code here running in the privileged pre-boot environment. Not portable or secure in any way. OpRoms _may_ now be checked for SecureBoot signatures on systems where that's set up properly at least.
EFI ByteCode (EBC) is meant to help at least the portability side. I'm not sure if anybody is actually delivering devices with EBC OpRoms yet though. I'm also not sure if anybody is looking at using the EBC VM to sandbox untrusted OpRoms.
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Since that page is a little dense, the higher-level version: PCI supports Option ROMs (OpRoms) - plug in device like a NIC or a GPU, your BIOS actually loads compiled code from it and executes it on the CPU. In many systems for example PXE booting (net booting) is actually a function of the NIC, executing code on the CPU to load an operating system. We're talking actual x86/x86_64 machine code here running in the privileged pre-boot environment. Not portable or secure in any way. OpRoms _may_ now be checked for SecureBoot signatures on systems where that's set up properly at least.
EFI ByteCode (EBC) is meant to help at least the portability side. I'm not sure if anybody is actually delivering devices with EBC OpRoms yet though. I'm also not sure if anybody is looking at using the EBC VM to sandbox untrusted OpRoms.