Firmware change (Re: Microsoft)

[John Watlington]

On May 15, 2008, at 10:39 PM, Korakurider wrote:

> On 5/16/08, Nicholas Negroponte <nn at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of
>> running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems,  
>> and was
>> developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual
>> boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the
>> existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard
>> BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this "free
>> BIOS," the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware  
>> currently
>> available.
>
>    I am not firmware-savvy but: what prevent windows from booting with
> V1 Firmware and how do they resolved it?  (that is Ivan mentioned in
> his blog article?)

Unlike Linux, Windows requires a BIOS to perform certain operations
for it (ACPI, for example).  OFW v1 didn't support those operations.

>    What I would like to understand is security risk the change will
> give users of our linux stack.  Don't we really need to be worry about
> that?

We want to run on top of OFW v2 (or v1) because it supports our
security model, whereas a plain BIOS doesn't.

wad