Bellevue, WA — (press release excerpt) — General Software, Inc. has demonstrated a high-availability application that monitors the health of the operating system in an embedded telecommunications device. If the operating system stops working, the application can reboot the device within seconds, even in the case of blue-screen and panic conditions. This high availability demonstration is a firmware application running in General Software's “Firmbase” operating environment.

Firmbase is a technology that runs what the company calls “firmware applications” in System Management Mode (SMM), a common feature of modern x86 silicon used to support the power management requirements of mobile computers. SMM is essentially a way to run code that is independent of the foreground operating system. Its robustness comes from the fact that dedicated hardware insulates the code so that firmware applications run even when the foreground operating system is missing, corrupted, or has crashed. Firmbase can also be used to run simple dedicated real-time tasks that operate in tandem with (and independently of) the foreground operating system. Because of its independence of the foreground operating system Firmbase can be used along with a variety of operating systems and has been tested with both Windows and Linux.

Firmbase simplifies the tasks of SMM programming by providing an easy-to-use API. Instead of having to write complex, error-prone assembly code, developers can write Firmware Applications in high level languages like C and C++ using the highly functional, multithreaded Firmbase API. Firmbase uses a patented technique to run these applications in SMM on the target device.

Firmbase itself is loaded by General Software's Embedded BIOS 2000 (on x86 targets) and operates before the OS boots, concurrent with the OS, and after the OS goes down. Embedded BIOS 2000 also includes a quick-boot feature, which allows the device to restart and resume operations within seconds — critical for a device that must support “six nines” or 99.9999 percent uptime.

 
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