[OpenBIOS] PReP PowerPC "emulation"

[Blue Swirl]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Artyom Tarasenko
<atar4qemu at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2010/9/17 Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber at web.de>:
>> I don't spot anything particularly wrong in there, except that OHW no longer
>> exists and its URLs are dead.
>
> Actually the URL was already dead more than one year ago, when I
> checked it last. I could find virtually no information about this
> project. What was the story behind OHW? Did it have problems with the
> license? Was it developed on top of a proprietary firmware (the word
> "hackware" sort of suggests it)? Did it have any features OpenBIOS
> doesn't have?

No, it was GPL and running on bare metal. What was truly hackware was
Forth support, it created a checksum of the Forth words to be executed
and based on checksums known in advance, it executed predefined
actions. This actually worked well enough to boot some OS.

For OpenBIOS, there could be some useful pieces, like RTAS, executable
formats (COFF, Mach-O, etc) and PREP stuff.

I liked the API approach for libraries, for example OHW libc header
files tried to match POSIX libc headers. I'd like to move to this
direction in OpenBIOS as well.

Here's one place I found with source:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openhackware/openhackware_0.4.1.orig.tar.gz