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I am trying to reverse engineer a firmkit in a bios, but in general I would like to know how can I debug a bios better.

I found a way to attach IDA to a vmware instance usign a GDB session GDB Debugging With VMware, but it seems like I am always racing to against the bios and boot up of the VM. I am wanting to have it stop in a place that I can follow and make sense of.

In general, What are some better practices when debugging a bios? Is IDA a decent debugger for this task? Is there something more meant for this task? Any other ideas are welcome also, I am really wanting to focus on reversing malware that is written to the bios.

Thanks!

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  • UEFI firmware is relatively easy to reverse engineer as most of the protocols are well documented and most implementations are based on the Tianocore reference implementation. A traditional BIOS is harder to reverse engineer as documentation is not readily available
    – fpmurphy
    Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 17:03

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You can try running your BIOS in QEMU. QEMU's -S option will pause boot until a debugger (gdb) is attached. IDA's debugger apparently works fine with QEMU, according to this article: https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/support/tutorials/debugging_gdb_qemu.pdf

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  • Same idea, I managed to use VMware 7 and it worked fine.
    – LUser
    Commented Jan 13, 2016 at 23:51

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