Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 10:32:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, mike@smith.net.au, wghhicks@ix.netcom.com, mini@d198-232.uoregon.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: x86 gods; advice? Suggestions? Message-ID: <199711091032.DAA24687@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199711090806.SAA00646@word.smith.net.au> from "Mike Smith" at Nov 9, 97 06:36:00 pm
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> > And it doesn't lock you into x86 to run the BIOS on video cards... > > where's the fun in that? > > I don't give a shit what it doesn't do, Terry. Boy, no sense of humor. What it *does* do, then is make cards not depend on particular processors. > What *I* care about is that OpenBoot is big, it is expensive and > proprietary, That last arrow struck home (the others missed, though, if expensive is meant in terms of overhead instead of as a subset of proprietary, which would make your statement redundant. Besides, you don't care how long it takes for things you do once, so long as it isn't "too long". I could, for example, bitch about the "waiting for SCSI devices to settle" on that count, since my controller already does that for me... the time it takes doing that -- until I dike it out of my local kernel -- is more than enough time to run OpenBoot several times over). It's true that if Sun was *really* interested in making their "standard" a _standard_, they'd provide source code for the thing. I think it's because they don't sell any machines with PCI slots yet. The people who were pushing it were Motorola, and the PowerComputing and Apple people, who wanted to use commodity cards in their boxes without a per card driver to set video modes, etc.. > and it is a complete crock from the POV of usability. Again, you only need to use it once. The code for the OS is similar to what I've been pushing in terms of VM86 fallback drivers. You don't use it except for the boot, so usability isn't an issue. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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