14 Driver Health Protocol

The Driver Health Protocol is a feature potentially required by UEFI Drivers following the UEFI Driver Model. If a UEFI Driver needs to report health status to the platform, provide warning or error messages to the user, perform length repair operations, or request that the user make hardware or software configuration changes, the Driver Health Protocol must be produced. This protocol is required only for devices potentially in a bad state and recoverable through either a repair operation or configuration change. The Driver Health Protocol should not be implemented if a device can never be in a bad state or a device can be in a bad state for which no remediation is possible.

The UEFI Boot Manager uses the services of the Driver Health Protocol, if present, to determine the health status of a device and display that status information on a UEFI console. The UEFI Boot Manager may also choose to perform actions to transition devices from a bad state to a usable state. See the EFI Driver Health Protocol section of the UEFI Specification for more details on how a UEFI Boot manager interacts with the Driver Health Protocol.

This chapter focuses on how to implement the Driver Health Protocol for a UEFI Driver managing a specific set of devices.