[OpenBIOS] FCode Limit (Was:Dictionary size limit per deviceinstance)

[Tarl Neustaedter]

Asif Haswarey wrote:
> Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
> ...
>> It would be good if openbios participants revived the standard, but it
> takes a lot of effort.
> 
> How would you categorize this "lot of effort"?
> 
> 1) Technical
> 2) Political

Hi Asif -

We had an off-line conversation trading warstories about
committee meetings and a lot of experience from when Mitch
standardized 1275 in the first place.

IEEE has a number of requirements on what the committee
has to contain, in terms of diversity of backgrounds
(industry, academia, ect.), which we don't have here.
Getting enough people from the right backgrounds would be
painful, and probably we'd end up having to teach some of
them the basics so they could contribute.

At a guess, the amount of effort (assuming no underlying
disagreements) would be about six months of committee
time (call it half-time for the committee members and
full time for a chair or editor). Then you'd have to come
up with the up-front money the standards organization is
apt to want - it depends what umbrella organization is
picked.

Note that committee work is expensive; you can't do it
all over phone calls, you have to have periodic face-to-face
meetings to make progress, where you can stick a bunch of
people in a room and not let them out for twelve hours :-).
Seriously, getting the members in a room where they *have*
to pay attention is critical to making progress. This means
a lot of travel, expensive in both money and time.

One problem is probably exemplified by Sun's position;
for all of our interest in OFW, I doubt we could get
a firmware engineer assigned to such a committee. Our
engineers are utterly saturated at this time, and our
CEO has announced we should expect layoffs sometime soon.
Other companies are probably facing similar strictures
at this time. Without some major product's success
hanging on the committee's completion, I doubt you'd
find enough industry representation at this time.

I do wish you luck in trying to formalize a re-invigoration
of the spec.