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EFI'ing And Blinding

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-Diamonds-on-the-soles-of-her-shoes dept.

In another installment of the "BSD code popping up in odd places story", Intel are promulgating the Extensible Firmware Interface, a new abstraction layer for the "operating system and platform firmware". As this PDF slideshow shows, libc in the EFI layer is from FreeBSD (page 9), as is the TCP/IP stack (page 11). Finally Intel appear to be releasing the whole thing under something very close to a BSD license (page 15). Which is nice.

7 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Fell prey to a missing feature in NT by yerricde · · Score: 2

    And I can't install on those, unless I have administrator access.

    If the designers of NT had any smarts, they would have added a feature where users can install software to their own account (think of ~/bin/ ).

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  2. Forth post... by yerricde · · Score: 2

    Forth is a postfix (reverse polish notation) language. So is PostScript. So is the HP calc language.

    Postmodernist Obscurantism to make code as unreadable as possible!

    Not all that unreadable to Fith speakers.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  3. Backslash dot by yerricde · · Score: 2

    fat12, fat16 and fat32 are the filesystems intel picked ... and they therefore use the slash of the Devil, aka the backslash.

    The fat filesystem can be used with whatever directory separator your FS implemetation supports. Try mounting your winpartition from a eunuchs-like operating system that supports it (Linux does, but does *BSD?) and accessing it with eunuchs-style forward slash.

    UNIX® is a trademark; eunuchs is not.
    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  4. Re:PDF? by Yardley · · Score: 2

    I'll reiterate your previous post for you, Signal 11.

    Why are you guys using PDF? It's a proprietary standard.. kindof goes against the grain of free softwae, don't you think? Why not use TeX, HTML, or postscript?

    You do not even mention Adobe Acrobat. PDF is not a proprietary standard. PDF is an open specification, usable by anyone who wants to take the time to implement it. Kind of like HTML or TXT.

    I've read your previous complaints about moderation, Signal 11, but when you post in this manner (lying about you past post, troll-like), you serve only to strengthen the arguments of those against you.

    --

    --
    He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
  5. Is it just me, or... by Morbid+Curiosity · · Score: 3

    ...does the phrase "Extensible Firmware Interface" sound a bit... y'know... Freudian?

  6. Python too. by smallpaul · · Score: 2

    The scripting language in their toolkit is the open source scripting language Python:

    http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/toolki t_overview.htm

  7. Open Firmware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    Why not just use OpenFirmware ?

    It there , it's open ( more or less ) it's cross-platfrom compatible etc..

    It is used by sun , apple-ppc and motorola-ppc machines.


    David Balazic , http://surf.to/stein