OFW vs. proprietary BIOS

[Jordan Crouse]

On 29/08/08 14:07 -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote:
> Edward Cherlin wrote.
> > I also want to see Open Firmware replace proprietary BIOSes everywhere. 
> 
> I'd like that too, but it won't happen.  The market forces that drive 
> the computer business still favor proprietary thinking, notwithstanding 
> the many FOSS arguments to the contrary.  Intel calls the shots by 
> controlling a big percentage of the silicon designs, and Intel is 
> pushing UEFI, partially because it allows them to keep their 
> chipset-dependent startup code proprietary.  The board manufacturers do 
> what the dominant silicon vendor allows them to do.

This seems like an ideal time to point out that the coreboot (LinuxBIOS)
team proudly counts OFW as a payload (though it sometimes lags because
you can count the number of us who understand Forth on one hand and have
three fingers left over).  Coreboot is growing daily (in fact, Via just
announced coreboot support for a number of its processors and motherboards.
Of course, AMD is also in the party; supporting code for Geode LX, Athlon,
Opteron, and Barcelona processors).

I realize that the OP was talking about a Forth only stack, but at least
coreboot can get you a little bit further along and still give you that
(ok) prompt that makes all the ladies swoon.  And maybe some day, we can
have a complete Forth stack supporting the AMD fam10 processors 
(I for one would like to see fam10 memory initialization in Forth).

If you want to help, check out:
http://www.coreboot.org/Buildrom

And help us work through some of the bugs in the OFW payload.

Jordan