There are various projects aiming to replace the BIOS. The following
URL provides a very nice summary:
http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/
The article is probably biased toward EFI, but I do think EFI has
the momentum and the most powerful backing (Intel and MS).
OpenBIOS is attempting what your want: OBP on x86. The problem I see
is device vendor support. It's going to be hard to get FCODE into
off-the-shelf devices.
I didn't look into FreeBIOS, but I have spent some time with linuxbios
and has been able to boot Solaris on a VIA board running linuxbios.
I like linuxbios very much as a minimal firmware for "fixed" hardware
environment (appliance, embedded). But it isn't designed to be for
general purpose use.
Shudong
>
> One of my pet gripes about x86 systems is having to interact with the
> clumsy menu-oriented BIOS. Coming from the SPARC world, I always enjoyed
> the clean command-line interface of OBP. Judging from similar comments on
> e.g. comp.unix.solaris and private discussions, it seems I'm not alone in
> this respect.
>
> I even asked Andy von Bechtolsheim after his presentation of the
> (then-upcoming) Galaxy systems during the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta final
> meeting about this, and while it seemed to be considered a desirable
> feature, there were also resource problems to make this happen.
>
> I can fully understand that moving Solaris/x86 to be OBP-only is a
> non-starter if the O/S is to run on non-Sun systems, and maintaining both
> BIOS and OBP support at the same time (to give interested customers the
> choice) poses resource problems, but with OpenSolaris, Sun is not the only
> player in this field. Given that the upcoming PowerPC port uses OBP and is
> working towards using GRUB as its bootloader, I'd like to assess the
> community interest in such a project. I'm certainly not the one to lead
> such an effort, since my knowledge of the x86 architecture is minimal and I
> know OBP only on the user side, but maybe there are others that would like
> to drive such an effort along.
>
> I thing there are several resources available to support this:
>
> * As mentioned, Solaris/PowerPC is going in this direction and already
> working on using GRUB with OBP.
>
> * There has been some talk to switch SPARC to NewBoot as well, among others
> to support ZFS boot. I've no idea of the current status of this effort,
> but work done there might help as well.
>
> * Last but not least there are both the OpenBIOS project
>
> http://www.openbios.info/
>
> and the commercial implementation by FirmWorks
>
> http://www.firmworks.com/
>
> I've not idea if EFI might be a viable alternative: I haven't ever seen it
> and certainly don't suggest to resurrect the ill-fated Solaris/IA64 port :-)
> Maybe the use of EFI by the Intel Macs might push it instead of OBP,
> although I'd very much prefer to see the same interface across all
> architectures supported by Solaris.
>
> Comments?
>
> Rainer
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
> _______________________________________________
> powerpc-discuss mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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