Open Firmware use on OLPC.

[Ronald G Minnich]

Speaking as the guy who really likes linux as bootloader, and will 
continue to use it for many platforms as I have for 6 years now, I have 
really thought a lot about this change from Linux to OFW, and I'm good 
with it.

I still am not sure I'm sold on all the merits (we've seen here that 
once you hit about 2 Ghz. CPUs, linux will boot another linux faster 
than polling-I/O-based bootloaders will), but I think you do what you 
have to do, and in this case OFW makes sense; Linux is just getting to 
darn big for a 1M part.

I think that we, as a group, should now go to the Linux kernel guys and 
ask them to please, pretty please, put OFW parsing into the PC side of 
the house -- it's in the PPC and Sun side, has been for years, no reason 
not to have it in the PC side. Stefan and I have asked for this from 
time to time for some years now, and always got the rejection; but now, 
10M OLPCs can't be wrong! I think we might get there this time.

A truly open, sensible, easily parsed table format for PCs; no more 
4-character labels a la ACPI; what a concept!

thanks

ron