[News] MorphOS, the Pegasos, and other PPC Operating Systems and Platforms | ANN.lu |
Posted on 22-Oct-2002 07:30 GMT by Jedi | 137 comments View flat View list |
By Thendic-France on MorphOS-News.de :
"In complete cooperation with Mai Logic, we have loaded the bplan OpenFirmware on both the Teron CX and PX. MorphOS runs well on both boards. The Pegasos was developed as a open hardware platform right from the beginning; it uses a BIOS to simplify a port of any operating system to the platform. This OpenFirmware is a well known standard (IEEE1275) and is used worldwide by companies like SUN Microsystems, Apple, Cisco, IBM, Motorola and others. We will support any OS vendor willing to port their software to our platform and will allow them to use our retail channels to sell their products..."
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MorphOS, the Pegasos, and other PPC Operating Systems and Platforms : Comment 56 of 137 | ANN.lu |
Posted by strobe on 22-Oct-2002 18:51 GMT | Let me speak as somebody who has actually used Open Firmware.
Open Firmware provides the host OS a complete device tree as well as a non-processor dependent way of initializing and using devices. Devices such as video cards and disk controllers have OF drivers in their firmware which allows the OS to use them even without native drivers immediately available. For example if you buy a new ATA PCI card adaptor and wish to connect a drive to it and boot from it, Open Firmware can search for and load the kernel and even kernel modules either embedded in the firmware or on the filesystem.
OF is an extremely flexible firmware specification which has made my life easier on several occasions. Sometimes something isn't quite right at the firmware level and I have fixed it by going to the Open Firmware prompt and entering some FORTH commands. In one case the device tree wasn't complete so I couldn't boot using a specific drive controller so I changed the boot-device parameter to something like /bandit@F2000000/ADPT,2930CU/@4,0:9. bandit is a PCI bus, ADPT,2930CU is a cheap Adaptec SCSI card, 4 is the SCSI ID, 0 is the bus, 9 is the partition (a PC BIOS can't even handle over 4 partitions). You usually also change the kernel perameters in OF by changing a variable like boot-args so you can root a different partition. You can even change the boot logic so it will boot something different depending on a key being pressed, or you can create a graphical menu to choose what to boot. At one point I had the choice of a MacOS icon, an OS X icon, or a penguin icon. It's very flexible primarily because you have a FORTH interpreter and OF drivers so you can program whatever you want, like a game of PONG.
The downside is the firmware tends to use more memory so cards which support OF tend to have a larger flash EEPROM (or whatever). However if you just have some VESA-based video card I'm not sure if OF can use it for display or you have to pray the kernel is loaded without error. |
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