* Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [010828 00:15]:
The Intel ia64 is planned to ship with EFI. I have had some very depressing converations with some Intel people which inevitably end with: "we don't care what you want to do, EFI is the best, you have to use it".
Since the Alpha died an unhonourable death I have heard quite a few rumours like that. ;-> I even heard sometimes signing an NDA does not provide you with the necessary information to get you any further ;-> I don't mean to be vague but sometimes one works on a project for a company which he can't openly disuss....it seems to be like this at lots of companies :->
In other words, Intel is playing the Monopoly card again and has no intention of telling us how to write BIOSes for the ia64.
They intend that the quality of the firmware be at least as good/suboordinate/noncompliant as the quality of the hardware.
Has anyone looked at this? this issue is crucial to both openbios and linuxbios. What should we do? I am downloading EFI now and it really looks like crap. It even includes a non-redistributable FAT-32 driver (courtesy microsoft).
Let's just wait for the next generation of Alpha^H^H^H^H IA64 hardware and how things evolve. If this hardware should at some time become close enough to certain competitors they bought (not to mention Alpha) there might be a small chance to reuse the information we already paid so dearly for with our blood, sweat and tears. Maybe it's just another rumour but I have heard that the hardware is not exactly what they want it to be and that things have to change if they want to keep that architecture alive.
Best regards, Stefan