On Aug 24, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Kein Yuan wrote: > Seems at the very first stage OLPC are using Insyde BIOS, then move > to LinuxBIOS, then move to OFW. My questions is: does OFW is the > only thing that act as BIOS? Or OLPC is using LinuxBIOS as BIOS and > use OFW as BIOS payload to do extra things?
Insyde was a development BIOS and bootloader used for a very short time until we were able to bootstrap our own. At that point, we moved to LinuxBIOS for both low-level hw init and bootloader, which was less than ideal and somewhat unwieldy. In a surprise move, SUNW then opened up their parts of the OFW/OBP code under a BSD license, which allowed Mitch Bradley (at that point working for us) to open up his own parts -- that of his company, FirmWorks -- and let us have an acceptably-licensed OpenFirmware we can use as a fancy and compact bootloader. LinuxBIOS still does low-level hardware initialization, and there aren't plans to change that in the near future. (Mitch will correct me if I got any of the history wrong.) -- Ivan Krstić <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://radian.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
