On Nov 21, 2016, at 9:34 AM, Michael wrote:
Dear list, thank you for the help with cross-compiling for ppc64 so far! It is important but I overjumped enthusiastically the OF basics :-)
I read many webpages, hints and maybe old sites etc and solved many things. But is there a "beginners how-to" somewhere? What I would find most usefull:
The website does have several pages that supply information. If you feel there should be more added, I will be glad to do so.
- Best source-code to use? There is a version-1.1.zip, a svn repo and
a git repo.
The git repo is what we are using now. I would chose that.
- The names are also a bit confusing when you see it first. I know
about the IEEE standard and a few things about the history (from wikipedia), but if you for example visit the website and click on the "openfirmware" link, the you see a page with "OpenBIOS" heading. So even if one knows about history, there is confusion about actual used names.
We use OpenBIOS as the project's name. Open Firmware is a standard OpenBIOS follows.
- How is the device-tree given to OF? And how does OF handle it over
to a linux kernel?
I don't think Linux touches the OpenBIOS device tree. It likes to discover things for itself.
- Minimal prerequisites on a new hardware, so that OF is able to run?
E.g. which type of RAM does it need? Does it need a stack or .text segment or other things to run (like c-code)? ...
Being a BIOS, I would think about anything could run OpenBIOS. I think any computer made in the last 20 years should work.