Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 15:37:41 -0700 From: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS? Message-ID: <200006152237.PAA00762@mass.osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:13:37 EDT." <39495511.3B7E5658@bellatlantic.net>
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> > 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). It's still entirely useless without the _board_specific_ initialisation code, which vendors typically aren't going to just hand out. EFI can layer over an existing PC BIOS (ie. you still need a BIOS), or it will require board-specific code if it's going to be the native firmware. The real issue with replacing a system's BIOS is not the top layer (services etc.), it's initialisation and random magic that is entirely specific to the board's actual implementation details. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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