ron wrote: > >I think that we, as a group, should now go to the Linux kernel guys and >ask them to please, pretty please, put OFW parsing into the PC side of >the house -- it's in the PPC and Sun side, has been for years, no reason >not to have it in the PC side. Stefan and I have asked for this from >time to time for some years now, and always got the rejection; but now, >10M OLPCs can't be wrong! I think we might get there this time. > >A truly open, sensible, easily parsed table format for PCs; no more >4-character labels a la ACPI; what a concept!
With the very small overhead I have seens using ofw in the current boot proces. It might make sense to have ofw a general second stage booter for Linux (FreeBSD uses a similar, not very wel documented system) When I saw this announcement I had happy memories back to the late eighties, and the Sparcstation One, which came with an early version of ofw. This was light-years ahead of PC-bios, I think it still is -- A bios you can program even though you have to learn a little Forth, any UNIX freak would think why not. I tried to tear the ofw image apart, and if the "files" were compressed with lzma instead of gzip, it all fits in around 220 kbyte, which means that a LinuxBIOS with ofw could fit into any commodety 256k BIOS used in ordenary PC's - so this could really be a lifter for LinuxBIOS aswell. I am looking forward to seeing some of the tools to build ofw images appear. I think this is really good news - Thank you very much Regards Peter Lorenzen _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@laptop.org http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel