OpenBIOS and OpenBoot

[Fare Rideau]

Dear OpenBIOS people,
   have you by chance considered the fact that there already exist
a cross-platform IEEE standard for firmware?
It's called Open Firmware, and allows boot code to run unmodified
on a variety of platforms, based on a bytecode ANS FORTH interpreter:
* Sun SPARCs (on which it first appeared -- try STOP A someday)
* PowerPCs
* ARM

ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/me/mejohnsn/OFIntro.html
http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/
ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/p1275/
http://www.firmworks.com

If you write something for PCs, it would be great if it reused this
proven, standard, design. And if you need a FORTH core, there already
exist lots of them, including PFE, GNU forth (gforth), and many others.

http://www.forth.org/
ftp://ftp.forth.org/pub

And of course, if you are to use this standard,
you should contact the Open Firmware committee,
to be in synch with whatever they have done or intend to do
about the PC platform...

Just my 2p worth. I'm not subscribed to this list in any way,
I've just seen an announce on the [e-mail] mailing list.
Hence, if you want to reply me, use private e-mail.

Good luck!

## Faré | VN: Уng-Vû Bân   | Join the TUNES project!  http://www.tunes.org/ ##
## FR: François-René Rideau |    TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System     ##
## Reflection&Cybernethics  | Project for a Free Reflective Computing System ##
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

[Stefan Reinauer]

On Tue, 9 Jun 1998, Fare Rideau wrote:
> Dear OpenBIOS people,
>    have you by chance considered the fact that there already exist
> a cross-platform IEEE standard for firmware?
> It's called Open Firmware, and allows boot code to run unmodified
> on a variety of platforms, based on a bytecode ANS FORTH interpreter:
> Sun SPARCs (on which it first appeared -- try STOP A someday)
> PowerPCs
> ARM

I heard about that, but I was told it had some major or minor
disadvantages. can't remember anything right now, though
> If you write something for PCs, it would be great if it reused this
> proven, standard, design. And if you need a FORTH core, there already
> exist lots of them, including PFE, GNU forth (gforth), and many others.

Does this fit into 128k? :-)
How big is the rom on sparc/arm?

Stefan