Re: OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

Tarl Neustaedter  writes:
> Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> [...]
> > So basically there is no real way around having an x86 option rom. It
> > seems. Intel is trying to break out and move firmware developers to
> > their EFI bytecode, which does the same thing OpenFirmware FCode does,
> > just with the need of 4*8MBit Flash to store all of the virtual machine
>
> Actually, my understanding is that the multi-megabyte flash is only
> required for the IA-64 implementation. The IA-32 implementation of EFI
> from some vendors is reported to fit comfortably in 1MB.

The EFI guys have been working really hard to get their footprint
down. IA-64 native code gives you an automatic 3x code bloat so
it trivially requires 3x more rom space.
> One thing we've discovered recently is that the x86 firmware world
> is rife in rumors, FUD, and propaganda. It's pretty startling.
> > I've dropped the illusion of getting convinced some day that EFI is the
> > way to go,
>
> It certainly looks good; they seem to have learned a bunch of
> lessons from the OpenFirmware experience. Unfortunately, we
> got stopped by license issues - to go any further than just the
> basic spec, there is a "click to agree" license button on the
> web page which our legal team told us not to click.

They missed the simplicity part.  But they did at least spec
something that did not use interrupts.

OF was not picked at least in part because they did not want to
dilute ACPI.

Eric

OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Eric W. Biederman  [040205 00:52]:
> OF was not picked at least in part because they did not want to
> dilute ACPI.

Whereas LinuxBIOS is a good example that this need not be the case. 
If running OpenBIOS on top of LinuxBIOS, you can of course still use
the ACPI tables generated by LinuxBIOS ;-)

Stefan