Open Firmware is now free

A full twenty years ago, Mitch Bradley sat down to write the firmware (BIOS) code for Sun's upcoming SPARCstation line. The resulting code, then called OpenBoot, shipped on SPARC systems for years, and found its way into other vendors' computers as well. Mr. Bradley eventually left Sun to continue to work with this code, now called Open Firmware. It has proved to be useful for system manufacturers who found it to be a quick way to get their hardware going. Twenty years later, he is still at it at his company, FirmWorks.

As of this week, however, one aspect of Mr. Bradley's job has changed: he is now working with free software. Between code releases by Sun Microsystems and FirmWorks, the entire Open Firmware system is now free. Most of it is available under the BSD or MIT license; it can be browsed on the net or obtained from the Subversion repository at svn://openbios.org/openfirmware.

Open Firmware is an interesting system. At its core, it is an interpreter for the Forth language; most of the higher-level functionality is implemented in Forth and run on the interpreter. That will make the Open Firmware source relatively opaque for those of us who are not accustomed to working in stack-based languages; Open Firmware will certainly have the only ext2 filesystem code which looks like this:

    : ext2fsfread   ( addr count 'fh -- #read )
       drop 
       dup bsize > abort" Bad size for ext2fsfread"
       file-size  lblk# bsize *  -	( addr count rem )
       umin swap			( actual addr )
       lblk# read-file-block	( actual )
       dup  0>  if  lblk#++  then	( actual )

The use of Forth does help to keep the Open Firmware code compact and quick, however. This system can work with several different filesystems, perform TCP/IP networking (including functioning as an HTTP server or client), work with USB devices, and drive a wide range of devices in general. And it all fits in about 350KB of flash, with the ability to shoehorn it into 256KB if need be.

Open Firmware can also be useful for debugging hardware issues. The Forth interpreter is available at the system console, allowing a sufficiently clued developer to poke at device registers directly and see what happens. This feature is especially useful when trying to bring up new hardware which is displaying unexpected behavior. As Mr. Bradley has been heard to say:

Open Firmware is a foot-shooting tool of substantial power.

The Open Firmware code was widely used, even when it was a proprietary product. This code will be even more widely distributed soon. Back in October, the One Laptop Per Child project announced that it would be adopting Open Firmware for its systems. LinuxBIOS will remain on those systems as the low-level BIOS, but Open Firmware will be the code which performs boot loading and presents the firmware-level interface to the user. The OLPC decision was based on smaller size, greater speed, and greater flexibility of the Open Firmware code. Once Open Firmware set on the path toward a free release, OLPC's decision was relatively easy.

In the future, the now-free nature of Open Firmware may cause it to appear on a number of new systems, in places where a proprietary BIOS would have been found before. As a result, a part of our systems which has traditionally been proprietary and closed might just become open and free. So, while many of us may never work with this code directly, we'll likely benefit from its freedom anyway.

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