Refinery is a work-in-progress application for exploring UEFI environments. It is currently a very simple C application amounting to a VGA text-mode "hello world." I plan to replace the C application with a Common Lisp application before developing it further.

Common Lisp is not a natively supported language for UEFI systems. I'm designing and implementing a lisp virtual machine tailored to UEFI, partly to avoid writing large amounts of asynchronous, tediously error-checked C, and partly for the fun of implementing an entire language stack.

The lisp implementation for Refinery is named "Borax" after the mineral used as a flux in metallurgy. The design of Borax is itself in flux (😉) but at a high level the plan is to organize the implementation into a virtual machine with two implementations: one in C and one in lisp. This should enable developing as much of the system as possible in lisp itself, with the aid of an existing hosted lisp implementation (in practice, SBCL).

The design, such as it currently is, is explained mainly through the comments in the header files under BoraxPkg/Include/Library. To briefly summarize:

1. BoraxMemory.h describes the design and implementation of the allocator and garbage collector.
2. BoraxObjectFile.h describes the ELF-like intermediate format that will be used to prepare and load lisp images and compiled files.
3. BoraxVirtualMachine.h describes the bytecode language the virtual machine will interpret (the current plan is for Borax to be a compiled-only implementation).

Refinery is a UEFI application written against the TianoCore EDK II API. The C components of Refinery and Borax are only designed to be buildable by the edk2 build system. To this end, the uefi-workspace repository vendors the refinery repository, edk2, and in future any other build dependencies. The uefi-workspace repository also contains scripts for setting up the development environment, building the software, and running tests.