Shudong Zhou writes:
> There are various projects aiming to replace the BIOS. The following
> URL provides a very nice summary:
> http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/
Thanks, that was really useful.
> The article is probably biased toward EFI, but I do think EFI has
> the momentum and the most powerful backing (Intel and MS).
This may well be, given the recent adoption of EFI on the new Intel Macs,
even though they had used OpenBoot before.
> OpenBIOS is attempting what your want: OBP on x86. The problem I see
> is device vendor support. It's going to be hard to get FCODE into
> off-the-shelf devices.
True, but this should only be an issue for devices you intend to boot of?
For NICs, there's the question if one could/would want to leverage PXE even
with OBP. I have no real idea if this is feasible, since as I said I'm
just a user interested in OBP on x86.
As the recent question about OpenSolaris on Intel Macs indicated, it may be
necessary to support at least EFI and legacy BIOS on Solaris/x86, and if
there's enough community interest, one might add OpenBoot to the mix as
well :-) Apart from you, nobody commented yet, so I've no idea if there's
any interest to pursue such a project.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
