Open Firmware use on OLPC.

[Peter Lorenzen]

ron wrote:
>
>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!

With the very small overhead I have seens using ofw in the current boot proces. It might make sense to have ofw a
general second stage booter for Linux (FreeBSD uses a similar, not very wel documented system)

When I saw this announcement I had happy memories back to
the late eighties, and the Sparcstation One, which came with
an early version of ofw.  This was light-years ahead
of PC-bios,  I think it still is -- A bios you can program
even though you have to learn a little Forth, any UNIX freak
would think why not.

I tried to tear the ofw image apart, and if the "files" were compressed with lzma instead of gzip, it all fits in around 220 kbyte, which means that a LinuxBIOS with ofw could fit into
any commodety 256k BIOS used in ordenary PC's - so this could
really be a lifter for LinuxBIOS aswell.

I am looking forward to seeing some of the tools to build
ofw images appear.

I think this is really good news - Thank you very much

Regards

Peter Lorenzen