[Wylug-help] [Off-Topic] BIOS questions

[Roger Leigh]

"Dave Brotherstone" <davebrotherstone at gmail.com> writes:

> On 13/03/06, Emon <contact_emon at gawab.com> wrote:
>
>     1)
>     I once heard (from an unreliable source) that Intel & others are
>     working on a open source alternative for BIOS, is it true?, if
>     so, then how far have they progressed?

There's LinuxBIOS (http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page)

Intel have EFI, a more modern BIOS replacement, which is supported by
Linux, but not widely available.  It's currently used on IA-64 and
high-end i386 IIRC.

For non-PC hardware (machine-independent, in fact), there is
OpenFirmware.  It's based on Forth.  This is used by POWER/PowerPC
hardware, such as Apple Mac, IBM PReP, CHRP and other systems, as well
as other architectures, I believe.  http://www.openfirmware.org/

Quite why Intel didn't just use OF, rather than invent the
similar-but-different EFI, I don't know.  There's no reason OF
wouldn't work in Intel PCs.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh
                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
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