OFW vs. proprietary BIOS

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 31.08.2008 um 18:51 schrieb K. K. Subramaniam:

> On Saturday 30 Aug 2008 5:37:07 am Mitch Bradley wrote:
>> A lot of the OFW functionality is targeted toward the task of  
>> managing a
>> large collection of possibly-plug-in I/O devices, then booting a  
>> general
>> purpose OS.
> Like Squeak for example :-). Honestly, I think Squeak makes a very  
> good shell
> for OFW. Primitive calls or device drivers can be easily integrated  
> via
> plugins/FFI. While the same can be done even with asm/gcc, I would  
> expect
> overall dev and testing time to be much smaller with Squeak.


Of course, the same can be (and has been) said about OFW itself. The  
interactive Forth shell was reportedly very helpful in bringing up the  
XO hardware.

And just like OFW, SqueakNOS implements device drivers not with  
plugins (which require C code) but in the language. It only has a  
handful primitives to read/write from memory and i/o ports, and  
register for IRQs.

- Bert -