The main reason I do not like OpenFirmware is that it presumes a slow, frozen driver in ROM with its own frozen idea of how interrupts and DMAs should work will be good enough that my kernel will never want to replace it. Yeah, right.
Well, that was a property to OF that I was unaware of. What I like about OF is the Forth code, the device tree and that is is a standard.
Agreed. I guess I'm just cranky because I think OpenFirmware is limping because their mission is limited to "like the PC BIOS, only cleaner and interpreted". This means they don't provide compelling value to the hardware vendor who only cares about x86. So it's no wonder the PC market ignores them and it's the SPARCs and Macintoshes that use OpenFirmware.
If OpenBIOS wants to go the OpenFirmware route, that would actually speed adoption among some groups, as the NetBSD guys have quite a bit of experience already using OF drivers to boot their kernel.
http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/ofw.html
Todd Whitesel toddpw @ best.com