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Open Firmware does not work on Intel processors.

The NetApp FAS900 filers, and most earlier NetApp x86 machines, use Open Firmware (the exceptions were the machines, mostly NetCache machines, using standard Intel boxes OEM'ed). Now, that was a port of the Firmworks OpenFirmware code to x86, rather than a version of Apple's independently-implemented Open Firmware implementation, but there's nothing technical that prevents Open Firmware from running on x86.

Just to make it clear, Open Firmware implementations exist for Intel hardware:
http://www.firmworks.com/open_firmware/literature/ open-fw.pdf

Why change?

I don't know of anyone who makes an open standards based system using the the PowerPC architecture. IBM did release a reference design for a PPC based motherboard, but as far as I know no one every produced it.

CHRP, the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform is what you're looking for, and it's been around since before there were Apple PowerPCs. AFAIK most, if not all, the PowerPC-based workstations shipped by IBM, the BeBox, various third-party PowerPCs such as those from PowerComputing, and many of Apple's machines (even tody) are either compliant or as-close-to-compliant-as-makes-sense with this or evolutions of this standard (such that some fanatics Rhapsody/OS X were able to get it running on AIX PowerPC workstations).

CHRP Links

I'm not going to paint myself into a corner with a proprietary system from anyone, let alone Apple.

Until I can make the computer from sand, copper ore, and crude oil using recipes downloaded from the internet (i.e. "The Diamond Age"), I don't see the useful distinction between being able to build a computer out of proprietary chips from one of, count them, two CPU manufacturers, a video card from one of, count them, two graphics card manufacturers, etc. and simply buying a computer that works.

Open Firmware is at least non-proprietary, and is used by Sun and Apple on their computers

There is even an open source implementation of Open Firmware in the form of OpenBIOS.

There is also a commercial implementation of Open Firmware from FirmWorks.

I should note that that IBM RS/6000 machines also use Open Firmware.

• Apple's OpenFirmware home page
• An overview of OF
• The Official homepage
• Firmworks, the OF folks (Linux info)
• TinyBoot
• The Open Directory Project category for OpenFirmware

For those of you that haven't heard of OpenFirmware, it's basically the "BIOS" on Macs.

... and Sun machines (where it's called OpenBoot). And also the now-extinct CHRP and PReP (both PowerPC-based) platforms. And also on some ARM-based platforms. And on other platforms too, since there are two companies (this one and this one) that sell OpenFirmware development kits, which are typically used for embedded systems.

By the way, it is an IEEE standard: standard #1275. For more info, you might want to check out The OpenFirmware web site.

Don't forget Open Firmware.

Say it with me: OpenFirmware

Better yet: Sing it with Mitch Bradley : Firmware, Open Firmware...

IBM did release publicly the Common Hardware Reference Platform, also known as CHRP

That upcoming (we're told...) Amiga thing is loosely based on this. But there are a number of commercially available mother boards based on CHRP, including a Linux vendor. Ports are available.

The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP, aka PPCP) was released many many years ago, but it hasn't really taken off. IBM did sell some of these systems, and the modern pegasos platform offers G3 & G4 processors.

Here's some more technical info.

p.s. mac sleeping is perfect - sleep and wake are quick, and network connectivity (even when roaming) is very fast.

With something like openfirmware, apparently you have to have a ROM big enough to contain valid code that can run on both IA-32 and IA-64 and PPC, etc., or you end up with things like PC-only and Mac-only cards...

Nope, plug-in drivers on Open Firmware compatible cards are written in FCODE, which is a Forth bytecode language.

Completely machine independent.

The article says that Open Firmware was considered, but they didn't want to drop ACPI.

Frankly, Open Firmware has a lot of features you are just never going to see on home machines/cheap server boxes as long as Intel and MS are in charge. I'd rather have OF on my server boxes, hence why I chose a Sun machine.

Most alternatives would have significantly swelled the ROM container size requirement or the motherboard support overhead requirement or had licensing, IP or other impediments to deployment into the wider industry that we had no practical means to resolve.

Take ACPI, for example. If you take out the P of ACPI, and stick to the configuration features, you end up with something very similar to (some parts of) OF. A device name tree? OF has it. An intermediate language for device initialization? OF has it.

OF has only one difference to ACPI: OF works. Devices are made with valid machine-language drivers, so that the OS doesn't have to patch it upon boot, etc, etc, etc. Don't take me wrong, I really believed that ACPI would be great, but when people started implementing it, we saw what mess it became. It was one of the reasons I moved away of the x86 platform. It is just a bunch of hacks.

So why Intel created ACPI? Because while ACPI is also "open", Intel can control it. And Intel knows that while it keeps the power of defining standards, it will be the leading chip manufacturer: it helps to keep it top of mind in terms of consumer ICs.

For those who don't know what OF is, take a look at this.

Anyone remember CHiRP? It seemed like such a good idea at the time...

So looking at Hyper Transport, at this stage, I'm a tad leery of it because it didn't come from Apple. I'm worried that it might have some kind of negative impact on the technology.

The necessary question is; is this going to be the next evolutionary step for Apple, or is it just an added hardware feature that is relatively minor?

From everything I've read about the "speed issue" on Apple hardware over the past few years, the biggest thing holding current generation Macs back isn't the PowerPC chips, but the frozen in evolutionary time speeds of the boards those CPUs plug into. Apparently you can only expect a 20-30% speed bump by adding a second G4 processor to one of these systems, but it's not because the chips are slow -- they're really not all that bad -- but because they're bandwidth starved.

Hyper Transport is specifically aimed to address this bottleneck. No, it cannot be a "relatively minor" thing, because if it lives up to its promise and relieves the biggest bottleneck in the current generation machines, a good chunk of the gap between PPC and x86 machines will be closed. That's a big deal.

I think it was back in '95 or '96. IBM and Motorola were in development of dual-platform supporting processor called CHRP or Common Hardware Reference Platform.

The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) Specification describes a family of machines based on the PowerPC(tm) processor that are capable of booting multiple operating systems including Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX® and Solaris(tm).

Wouldn't that have been cool? What ever happened to that idea? Here's the old documentation.

It appears that IBM has some information on their site that is still recent, dated Sept. 2002. Weird. I'd love to have one of those machines. PowerPC 970? Forget about it.

I think it was back in '95 or '96. IBM and Motorola were in development of dual-platform supporting processor called CHRP or Common Hardware Reference Platform.

The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) Specification describes a family of machines based on the PowerPC(tm) processor that are capable of booting multiple operating systems including Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX® and Solaris(tm).

Wouldn't that have been cool? What ever happened to that idea? Here's the old documentation.

It appears that IBM has some information on their site that is still recent, dated Sept. 2002. Weird. I'd love to have one of those machines. PowerPC 970? Forget about it.

Here it is, OF - a boot loader/bios indeed, but much much more; essentialy a Forth interpreter running on the naked hardware, very useful for manipulating registers, writing boot drivers, and such. A comprehensive guide to using it on a PowerMac is up here, but it probably applies to other systems too.

I've always wondered why IEEE 1275 / OpenBIOS / OpenFirmware never caught on. IMO it is a much better and much more powerful alternative to the closed and aging BIOS found in most PC's. People are always complaining about "Closed" operating systems but don't bat an eye that their BIOS is closed...

One of the most widespread contemporary uses of Forth is the Open Firmware boot ROMs used in Suns, Macs and even Linux. It's even defined by IEEE standard 1275-1994.

It was based on Langston and Perry's Forth83, and developed by Mitch Bradley at Sun, who is a major Forth guru and hardware guy. When you hit L1-A on a Sun, it dumps you into the Forth boot monitor, which let you do all kinds of things to the hardware and nvram configuration.

The point to having a cross platform bytecode dialect of Forth in firmware, is so hardware devices can have drivers, diagnostics and configuration interfaces in ROM that will execute on any system, no matter what the processor. That was implemented long before Java was ever invented.

-Don

One of the most widespread contemporary uses of Forth is the Open Firmware boot ROMs used in Suns, Macs and even Linux. It's even defined by IEEE standard 1275-1994.

It was based on Langston and Perry's Forth83, and developed by Mitch Bradley at Sun, who is a major Forth guru and hardware guy. When you hit L1-A on a Sun, it dumps you into the Forth boot monitor, which let you do all kinds of things to the hardware and nvram configuration.

The point to having a cross platform bytecode dialect of Forth in firmware, is so hardware devices can have drivers, diagnostics and configuration interfaces in ROM that will execute on any system, no matter what the processor. That was implemented long before Java was ever invented.

-Don

The BIOS of the x86 world, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why we struggle but never quite reach a integrated architecture for PCs. Lord knows I've fought with quite a few of them, and hated having to remember to disable this in order to use that, with no guarantee that my change would work all the time.

Shouldn't our computers know what hardware it holds and configure itself automatically nowandays, with little to no user interaction? It would make all that "plug-and-play" stuff that's taken for granted on Macintosh systems, to site an example, true for my PC game box as well.

The technology is already here in the form of Open Firmware, which Apple uses as well as Sun. There is at least one company that has OF implementations for x86, but so long as Intel has a vendor lock on how motherboards are designed for their chips, I don't see this annoying and archaic method of maintaining a board going away any time soon.

OF is configurable enough for crazy whiz kids, if necessary. A better BIOS would make things a lot better for the OS and bring a better experience. Why can't we break out of the BIOS hell? Hadn't we learned the lessons from the Y2k-incompatibilities that some BIOS had, among other headaches?

CHRP:
Common Hardware Reference Platform. 1995 AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) strategy for doing the same thing but with details like OpenFirmware defined. Motorola lost several hundred million dollars when Apple killed it's licensing program and they were stuck with warehouses full of CHRP motherboards. Be's BeBox were based on a superset of CHRP. This evolved into Apple's modern line of Macs as well as IBM's RS/6000.

Operating systems that were to run on this hardware:
Windows NT (up to versions 3.5.1 and 4.0, Service Pack 2), AIX (still does on the RS/6000 & AS/400), OS/2-PPC, Solaris, ChorusOS, Netware, Taligent (never released), WorkplaceOS, LynxOS, MkLinux, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, MacOS.

Most folks aren't aware that Apple actually did ship some fully CHRP boxes, the Apple Network Server 500 & 700. These ran AIX by the way, from Apple.

Also any number of other CHRP-derived boards have shipped over the years, most based on Motorola's VME series but IBM has also released plans.

On a related topic there was a widespread rumor in '95 that had lots of legs of IBM's PowerPC 615 project. This was supposedly an x86 (486?) core on chip alongside a PPC (604?) core. They'd share data paths, cache, other portions but would be able to run either x86 or PPC OS's. Nothing ever publicly came of it.

FirmWorks has a popular OpenFirmware implementation.

The prom stuff (OpenBoot) was originally written by Mitch Bradley.

Yes, because you'd have to emulate the /entire/ 8086 environment perfectly for it to work. And then it would be useless to the rest of the system. XFree86 has been working on emulating that real mode on x86 with limited success.
this starts to describe the capabilities and usefullness of OF.

It's still difficult to upgrade and loaded with proprietary hardware.

Difficult to upgrade? What have you been smoking? With the possible exception of a total motherboard replacement, the G4 (and its B&W G3 ancestry) is quite possibly the easiest-to-upgrade machine I've ever seen in every aspect.

As for "loaded with proprietary hardware" I'd watch what you're saying. Pretty much every single thing on that motherboard is now an open standard: Ultra-ATA for hard drives, PCI and AGP for cards, standard PC100 memory (or is it PC133 now?), USB and Firewire for peripherals, 10/100 Ethernet for networking, OpenFirmware for booting (yes, OpenFirmware is itself an open standard; check FirmWorks if you don't believe me), and so on. I should, by the way, note that the G4 AGP no longer has a proprietary Mac ROM on the motherboard anymore (the PCI graphics still do, as they use the legacy Yosemite motherboard rather than Sawtooth, but even the ROM's on these no longer contain any OS-level code). Proprietary hardware? Perhaps one or two things still, but don't even think of calling it "loaded" anymore.

The power user demands a machine that he/she can not only be proud of when it first comes out, but can remain potent for years to come (through upgrades to both operating system and hardware).

True, very true. I don't think you'll argue that the G4 isn't a machine to be proud of when first purchased. Now, look to the studies. It's been shown that Macs have a much longer useful life than any other desktop computer (indeed, usually double or triple that of the average PC in a given establishment); I have a seven-year-old machine at home which now has a G3 processor, a good amount of RAM, great storage space, and so on and so forth. Not only that, but it is still running all the latest software out there. In other words, Macs can and do remain potent for years to come, years longer than even most PC's, through upgrades of software and hardware, just as you said.

The G4 is aiming for the geek market, but just doesn't have the features that would make it attractive for more than a few months.

And what, pray tell, are those "features"? I don't see any glaring lack, except possibly that I'd like a couple more PCI slots and there are ways around even that problem.

By attempting to appeal to higher-end users but not changing its hardware strategy to one of modularity and maximum control, Apple will find that it has sown the seeds of bitter resentment.

Not changing its hardware strategy to one of modularity and maximum control? Perhaps we're on different wavelengths. The G4, as I see it, appears to be just about as "modular" as any PC I've ever seen (sure, there's the mobo issue, but that's the only problem I've seen and considering the way Mac upgrades tend to run this problem is actually quite minor). As for "maximum control" I don't see any real trouble in this area here either. Looks to me like I can dictate more or less exactly what does and doesn't go into my machine.

You did a good job of describing what the average power-user wants. Trouble is, the Mac fits your description perfectly. That's rather countrtproductive to your argument, which is thereby reduced to the level of "Macs suck because they're Macs" (since you have no arguments to support your claim). Perhaps you should actually look into these machines, rather than refer to 10-year-old FUD which hasn't been true for quite some time now.