On 2012-Sep-20 15:05 , JD wrote:
So if the initialization code is not publicly available, but is made available to Bios makers, could or would the devs of openbios.org contact AMD and Intel, sign NDA's and implement the initialization code in openbios? Or is there more to it than that?
As I understand, it's mostly a matter of effort. The initialization sequences are a mixture of stuff the chip vendors expected, the BIOS vendors understood, and a good chunk of stuff found out live once the first chips come off the testers. There's a lot of back-and-forth which never gets fully documented anywhere. There may be empiric limitations on what actually can be done during initialization which wasn't originally part of the specification, but the BIOS implementations end up using because it works.