Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:13:37 -0400
From:      Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net>
To:        Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org>
Cc:        Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>, Jung-uk Kim <juikim@engin.umd.umich.edu>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS?
Message-ID:  <39495511.3B7E5658@bellatlantic.net>
References:  <200006152147.OAA00521@mass.osd.bsdi.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Mike Smith wrote:
> 
> > well linuxbios is what I started here, and I pinged some folks on this
> > list about supporting freebsd as well as linux, and got a 'no interest'
> > back from some folks.
> >
> > I'm still up for it. I think it's easy.
> 
> I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
> months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
> well-documented board.  Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
> results pretty representative of the issue.

Maybe I'm completely mistunderstanding the subject, but
what about EFI (Extendable Firmware Interface) ? It's the
new Intel's proposal for BIOS. It's the only thing that will
be (and is) on IA-64, and also will be retrofitted on the
32-bit machines. It's a very flexible thing including extensive
API, OS-independent loadable drivers, networking, serial console, etc.
I'm in progress of reading the specs (avaliable from the Intel's
developer web site), so I don't know more detail yet. The spec says 
that the full source code of reference implementation is available 
for free. By the way, they used FreeBSD as the base of their EFI 
API implementation (libc, networking and other). 

-SB


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?39495511.3B7E5658>