Open Firmware is now free [LWN.net]

Open Firmware is now free

Posted Nov 20, 2006 4:41 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Open Firmware is now free by hollis
Parent article: Open Firmware is now free

It's not that Open Firmware is "better" than GRUB. It's that if you have open source firmware (be it BIOS, Open Firmware, or "other" like u-boot), GRUB is unnecessary.

OK. But I sensed that was being used as a argument in favor of switching to Open Firmware from what we have today. I don't think it's a good argument. In fact, even if I had Open Firmware, I'd probably have it load Grub from my disk.

The "small initial program" you talk about is an accurate description of today's BIOS or Open Firmware

I meant to refer to something smaller than today's BIOS and much, much smaller than Open Firmware. I can understand why people want an open source alternative to the BIOS boot loader we have now, but if it were as small as I would like, I don't think they would care that it's closed source.

For example, we could add an LVM driver to the firmware itself

I would rather add an LVM driver to something more mutable than flash, such as the standard USB flash drive I mentioned. That's why I don't care if I have open source firmware (if "firmware" means what lives in the flashable read-only memory that sits in the main address space at boot time).

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Open Firmware is now free

Posted Nov 27, 2006 20:23 UTC (Mon) by jimwelch (guest, #178) [Link]

>> I don't think they would care that it's closed source.

I care about closed source for all the normal open/close reasons. The main reason's that affect me:

1. BUGS - some of my "old" computers don't do big disks.
2. DRM - some talk of only allowing certain OS's on a unit.
3. Features - LVM, boot from flash (missing on my old units), the next big hardware item (firewire disks).
4. Lack of support from the vendor to fix the above problems for old units.

Most of this is just not cost effective under the ancient proprietary system in use today for BIOS.

Open Firmware is now free

Posted Nov 28, 2006 7:04 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I care about closed source for all the normal open/close reasons. The main reason's that affect me:
...
Most of this is just not cost effective under the ancient proprietary system in use today for BIOS.

Those are all good reasons to care about closed source of today's BIOS, but not relevant to the point to which you are responding. That point is that with a small initial program instead of what we have today, people wouldn't care about having its source code. Such a boot program wouldn't be involved in any of the issues you list.

Getting back the OF question: The reasons listed are not only good reasons to have open source for the code that handles those things, but also for being able to update that code easily, for example with a 'cp' shell command instead of an arcane BIOS flash procedure. And in a way that if you screw it up, you can easily repair the damage. Open Firmware doesn't do any better than today's BIOS in those areas, and in fact is worse because there's so much more code in there that you'll want to update.