Open Firmware

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Wed Jun 4 00:51:06 CEST 2008


[ Processing mails accumulated during my vacation ... ]

Dale Schumacher wrote:
> Has anyone considered using Open Firmware [1] as a more capable bootloading
> system?

Hmm, no. Much like u-boot, it tries to solve the problem that we
want to have the functionality of a small operating system, but that
we can't afford to actually have that operating system there.

But we can :-)

OF would probably also need quite a bit of work before supporting our
hardware even to the point where we are already with u-boot. And it
would repeat the problem of needing to develop and maintain many
things twice - once for the kernel and once for the boot loader.

I wonder what troubles OLPC ran into with LinuxBIOS. I can understand
the slow boot time issues, but it should be easy enough to add a
fastpath for this.

- Werner




More information about the openmoko-kernel mailing list