Questions on LinuxBIOS and OpenFirmware

[Kein Yuan]

So in short words, OLPC is using LinuxBIOS to do low level HW init, then
transfer control to OFW, which also acting as boot loader to load Linux OS,
right?

Thanks a lot,
Kein

On 8/24/07, Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> On Aug 24, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Kein Yuan wrote:
> > Seems at the very first stage OLPC are using Insyde BIOS, then move
> > to LinuxBIOS, then move to OFW.  My questions is: does OFW is the
> > only thing that act as BIOS? Or OLPC is using LinuxBIOS as BIOS and
> > use OFW as BIOS payload to do extra things?
>
> Insyde was a development BIOS and bootloader used for a very short
> time until we were able to bootstrap our own. At that point, we moved
> to LinuxBIOS for both low-level hw init and bootloader, which was
> less than ideal and somewhat unwieldy. In a surprise move, SUNW then
> opened up their parts of the OFW/OBP code under a BSD license, which
> allowed Mitch Bradley (at that point working for us) to open up his
> own parts -- that of his company, FirmWorks -- and let us have an
> acceptably-licensed OpenFirmware we can use as a fancy and compact
> bootloader. LinuxBIOS still does low-level hardware initialization,
> and there aren't plans to change that in the near future. (Mitch will
> correct me if I got any of the history wrong.)
>
> --
> Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org
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