Techniques to support co-location and certification of executable content from a pre-boot space into an operating system kernel mode runtime environment. The invention enables platform firmware runtime drivers to be loaded into memory as executable images during a pre-boot process and subsequently mapped into an operating system's runtime environment when the operating system is booted so as to enable runtime services provided by the platform firmware runtime drivers to be called via operating system interfaces. Prior to loading the executable images, a type certification check that compares type structure information corresponding to a runtime driver's opcode with type structure information corresponding to an operating system interface used to call the runtime driver may be performed. Additionally, a runtime driver file integrity verification may also be performed using a digital signature and associated key. The runtime driver may be loaded from various platform storage devices, including flash devices and option ROMs.