|<><><><><> Original message from Sam Kirk <><><><><> |Eric, | |I speculate that their code is obfuscated not because anyone wrote it that |way deliberately, but because of historical accident, i.e., their legacy.
Their code is obfuscated in large part because they use cleanly nested subroutine calls while running in an environment that doesn't have a memory controller enabled. There are some pretty sick tricks to do four levels of subroutine calls without touching memory. They are slower than linuxbios because they are doing more and the assumptions that make about the environment they run in. The modern PC BIOS assumes that the hardware is broken and that there jobs is to indicated in some fashion and relatively accurately what is broken. When they get to the point that they have discovered that nothing is broken worse than expected they spin the disks up and boot. Linuxbios assumes that the hardware works and the you want to run linux as soon as possible. If you have linuxbios installed and have a hardware failure you won't get a magic beep code that tells you what is wrong you just'll have a boat anchor. Of course there are a large class of hardware failures that will convert your average motherboard with a PC BIOS install into a boat anchor as well, so that linuxbios ins't too far below par. |After as few as three generations of programmers have pounded on a body of |code, it can get ugly (as well as "obfuscated"). Only someone paid to work |on it fulltime could possible begin to deal with it after all that. I think that PC BIOS code probably doesn't look as bad in source form as it does in object form, but it stall has to be pretty bad. |With the linuxBIOS, you're off to a comparatively clean, fresh start. | |Like I always say: forever compatible, forever backwards. That's the |downfall of legacy. | |But so long as they can make a buck on it, it'll be here to stay, until |that Great Day comes when they can't hire anyone to work on it. |Or until something cheaper and better comes along. | |Am I right? We'll have to see. Linuxbios doesn't address the needs of a board shop that is cranking out 200,000 identical motherboards and doesn't really care what the BIOS does as long as the boards work. TJ Merritt [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-415-834-9111
