Modular and Composable Firmware Architecture

ODP offers Modularity and Agility not normally found in the firmware domain.

The buzz and the headlines generated by advances in the computer world typically belong to those who have created magic at the application layer. As such, this portion of the development community has seen exponential advances in the tooling and languages at their disposal. This has provided a high level of modularity and with it, agility, that has become synonymous with the market responsiveness we see in the evolution of our favorite applications.

Firmware development, on the other hand, has generally been mired in the processes of the past, and has not enjoyed this same level of modularity and agility.

“Systems scale better when their parts can evolve independently.”

Composable and portable component modules

ODP changes that paradigm and raises the tide. It is inspired by modern software engineering practices: composability, dependency injection, testability.

Components (e.g., battery service, serial logging, boot policies) are decoupled and swappable, enabling faster iteration and better maintainability.

graph LR
  PowerPolicy --> BatteryService
  PowerPolicy --> ChargerService
  PowerPolicy --> ThermalService
  BatteryService --> MockBattery
  ChargerService --> SMbusDriver

Because Rust enforces its memory and safety management guarantees at compile time, tooling such as that found in ODP Patina for example will build a DXE Core monolithically, without the need for an RTOS, and supports a composed modularity paradigm by design, streamlining certification and troubleshooting.