Slashdot Mirror

Open Firware has been around a lot longer than intel's EFI, and is used by Sun, IBM and Apple for their RISC boxes.

There is a free-as-in-speech implementation for the PeeCee called OpenBIOS.

It's implemented in FORTH.

Um...

http://www.linuxbios.org/
http://www.openbios.org/

IMHO, GPU companies should export a higher level interface from the card - say OpenGL, via firmware on the card.

You know, the fear of exactly that is what drives projects like OpenGraphics and OpenBIOS. Binary blobs are bad whether they're in software or firmware.

That's why we should support http://www.open-hardware.org/ and http://openbios.org/.

Open Firmware is a specification, not an implementation. In case you want an open-source implementation of Open Firmware, check out OpenBIOS. OpenBIOS can also be used as a payload for LinuxBIOS.

Open Firmware is a specification, not an implementation. In case you want an open-source implementation of Open Firmware, check out OpenBIOS. OpenBIOS can also be used as a payload for LinuxBIOS.

That article on CoolTechZone has blown it all out of proportions. Considering that Darwin (being the kernel of Mac OS X) is open source, it is only a matter of time before someone will either (1) engineer some sort of compatibility chipset, or (2) write kernel support for PC chipsets, to make Mac OS X run on commodity hardware.

I don't think Apple is intentionally preventing its users of doing that. Apple is just not going to support running Mac OS X on your average PC.

I think OpenFirmware is likely to be the major hurdle preventing you from running Mac OS X on your PC. Most PCs have BIOS that date back to the IBM PC clones. Modern computers (UltraSparc, Macs) have OpenFirmware instead. Your best bet is to check out OpenBIOS and see how you can get that running on your PC.

And then, you just need to make sure whatever other pieces of hardware on your PC has a driver in Darwin ... the same game that Linux has to play, all over again.

FORTH is trivial to implement (in a few hundred lines rather than a few thousand) and can be compiled or interpreted. It is interactive, the parser is completely minimal (all tokens are seperated by spaces with few exceptions) and the compiler/interpreter/system can be extremely compact. The code also runs relatively quickly. FORTH was fairly popular in the days of 8-bit micros and 16-bit minis for these reasons, and is still used in microcontrollers and workstation firmware.

OpenFirmware is standard of 300 pages.. EFI is 3000 pages, I think..

also, intel claims that it took them "hundreds of man years" to do EFI, while it took a friend of mine and me (basically) the spare time of about 1.5 years to implement most of OF.

see http://www.openbios.org/. (and yes, we're to busy to update the website)

There is no "source code", per se, you have to write it yourself for the architecture you want to implement it on. This is just getting underway for X86... I assume that is the problem area he's concerned with, right?

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.

Modern Macs, Suns and PowerPC CHRP systems all use Open Firmware, which is a significantly nicer boot system than a standard PC BIOS. As another poster pointed out, there is a free implementation available. Moving the x86 world to Open Firmware would be beneficial to hardware manufacturers, since they would only need to write a single piece of ROM code, rather than one for x86 and one for (almost) everything else. It would be some effort for operating system developers, since operating systems would have to be modified to boot from Open Firmware (not a problem for Linux, *BSD, etc, since they already support OF on non-x86 platforms).

OpenBIOS is what you want, and unlike LinuxBIOS, it's implementing an Open Standard too, as used by IBM, Apple and Sun : IEEE 1275-1994 or Open Firmware.

If there are any non-DRM BIOSes out there it's just because they haven't been updated yet. Don't buy them now, or you'll have no choice but to buy them for your next computer. AMI is gone, Phoenix is gone and Award no longer exists except as a sub-brand of Phoenix. Yes, this is a scary phenomenon. Vote with dollars. Apple's OpenFirmware doesn't contain any DRM (who knows for how long), Sun also uses OpenFirmware I believe?

If you absolutely insist on sticking to PC/Windows, consider supporting the OpenBIOS project, but it's not available as a hardware BIOS, nor in any motherboards that I know of, it's an after-the-purchase flash update (plus god only knows if it works properly). And since you're trying to flash away the DRM in the BIOS, you never know, it may not be allowed in the future. After all, we have to keep "viruses" from flashing our BIOSes now don't we? So lets make sure those flashes are cryptographically signed by Award/Phoenix/AMI...

I think you mean openbios.org

And for those where only open source will do, check out OpenBIOS, a open implementation of OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275-1994). Note I believe that it is still a work in progress.

OpenFirmware (defined in IEEE 1275 as updated in 1994) is no longer being maintained. It was withdrawn by the IEEE Standards Organization in, I belive, 1999. The rights to the document were sold to Global Engineering.

This does not mean that OpenFirmware is dead. On the contrary, there are several commercial implementations available. It does mean that it is no longer considered a "standard", though.

If you'd like some more information on OpenFirmware, you can visit the OpenBIOS web site.

The OpenBIOS project, implementing a free version of OpenFirmware, has been proceeding quickly in the last few months.. Go have a look at www.openbios.org

It's interesting because Open Firmware is based around a FORTH interpreter, using which high-level BIOS code is implemented. This code is portable across different binary architectures. This has interesting implications for the initialisation of peripherals. It also means you can program your own BIOS at a command line at system start up.

There are loads of other uses, and it's already an establishged Open standard, and has been in use for well over a decade.

Goodness me! I have on my bookshelf a book by Glyn Emery called The Students' FORTH. I bought it in 1988 when I was 14 from Waterstones in Aberdeen. It still has the price on it. It's a good book. Not many people have heard of FORTH nowadays, but it has its place.

Here is an attempt to implement Open Firmware on PeeCees.

Well, yes, of course, this makes sense. Given the rate at which all companies are 100% compliant with their licensing for the software that runs on their machines, I'm sure that they will just run right out to support the trusted computing initiative.

Sorry, but I have worked at way too many companies all sharing the same installation of Windows/Office/etc to believe that they are going to increase their IT budget 10-fold to support DRM. BSA or no.

Let Phoenix go ahead and introduce DRM into the BIOS. There are plenty of other BIOS manufactures that will be more than happy to step up in their place. OpenBIOS, anyone?

I second that. Sun's OpenPROM (Sun's version of OpenFirmware) is one of those details that help make Sparcs kick ass systems. The BIOS started as a "poor man's firmware" with all device interaction simplified into a "standard" set of hardware. Thus no new drivers would ever be needed, thus a simple program/set of interrupts worked perfectly. Yet today, we're trying to make PCs into high end workstations. We could do that far more effectivly if the BIOS didn't get in the way.

I'm curious. Does anyone know a reason why a PC BIOS chip couldn't be swapped with an OpenFirmware chip? I assume there are a few details such as launch location (0x07F0 IIRC) which must be taken into account. Plus, many OSes may have difficulties if the BIOS is not present. However, both those problems are fixable. Does anyone know of other issues?

More Info:

OpenFirmware
Free OpenFirmware Implementation

There is also OpenBIOS, an open source 'BIOS' based on OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware is the solution used on Sun, IBM and Apple based machines. OpenFirmware uses a forth interpreter and also presents the hardware as a device tree.

You should also check out the OpenBios project. They are working towards making a working openfirmware solution that will work on the x86 platform.

Anyway, what does anyone care? This is Slashdot, and the facts are irrelevant.

And why do I post at 0 when my karma is "excellent?"

Don't forget this stuff too.

There is an open source team out there that is working to make an Open Firmware solution for the Intel architecture. The project is called OpenBIOS. I hope this team creates a solution that will be taken up by the motherboard manufacturers, as I feel a new alternative is needed to the current BIOS. The BIOS as it stands still has limitations that are over 20 years old, such as 640K being defined as main memory - the rest being considered 'extended' memory.

There's a project to develop a free implementation of Open Firmware. It's at http://www.openbios.org/.

Intel tried this with their CPUID's. They failed. I'm guessing, and hoping, that the same thing will happen to Phoenix. This is total bullsh-t. Perfect timing for OpenBIOS project.

This simply means it is time for more people to contribute to the following Open Source BIOS projects:

See: LinuxBIOS and
Open BIOS.

Also of interest is this announcement of an Open Source BIOS that successfully booted Windows 2000. (It also boots Linux and OpenBSD.) This was in November of 2002, so there may have been more progress since. They also got help from the bochs project.

Sign up to help these teams today!

The best opposition to this would be and Open Source BIOS. I've no idea if this is possible, likely, or already being done. It simply seems like the best response to DRM enabled BIOS.

The OpenBios project has been in the works for a while now.

• OpenRemote - A remote control with many very neat features. Analog control, IR and RF communications (the site isn't nearly finished as I'm in the process of relocating to another province, yuck).
• OpenBIOS - A BIOS that doesn't suck. I've designed development hardware here.

There actually is the OpenBIOS project (www.openbios.org, but that's never been up that I've seen; try http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/), but I don't think that what you're talking about is something that would be done in BIOS on x86 hardware. AFAIK, the BIOS boots, starts the boot loader, provides some disk reading functions and the like to the boot-loader, which loads the kernel image, which uncompresses itself, bootstaps, and then, as its first act as a running kernel, switches to Protected mode, and makes the bios irrelevant (ie: never used for anything). This would probably have to be done via a (privileged) system call on Linux. I do agree, though, that this would be a very nice feature for Linux to have... another application would be to snapshot the system, and reload that snapshot at a later date to exactly recreate the system as it was then -- though there are several other technical hurdles to making this possible.

OpenBIOS will have network support. This is to easily allow network booting without using a PROM on the NIC.

It could be easily added in when we have something workable. Unfortunately, that won't be for a while yet.

They seem to be moving from
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/ to
http://openbios.org/.