Open Firmware

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with open-source firmware.
Open Firmware
StatusWithdrawn
First published28 October 1994
Domain
Boot firmware
Websiteplayground.sun.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 2007-06-30)
OpenBoot screenshot

Open Firmware is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun Microsystems where it was known as OpenBoot, and has been used by multiple vendors including Sun, Apple,[1] IBM and ARM.[citation needed]

Open Firmware allows a system to load

platform-independent drivers
directly from a PCI device, improving compatibility.

Open Firmware may be accessed through its

Forth programming language
.

History

Open Firmware was described by IEEE standard as IEEE 1275-1994. This standard was not reaffirmed by the Open Firmware Working Group (OFWG) since 1998, and was therefore officially withdrawn by IEEE in May 2005.[2]

Features

Open Firmware defines a standard way to describe the hardware configuration of a system, called the

hardware monitoring,[4]
: §5.1  whereas the alternative solution of performing a blind probe of the
I2C bus, as has to be done by software like lm_sensors on generic hardware, is known to result in serious hardware issues under certain circumstances.[4]
: §5.2 

Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a

diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth
and a subset of the Open Firmware library.

Being based upon an interactive programming language, Open Firmware can be used to efficiently test and bring up new hardware. It allows drivers to be written and tested interactively. Operational video and mouse drivers are the only prerequisite for a graphical interface suitable for end-user diagnostics. Apple shipped such a diagnostic "operating system" in many Power Macintoshes. Sun also shipped an FCode-based diagnostic tool suite called OpenBoot Diagnostics (OBDiag) used by customer service support and hardware manufacturing teams[5]

Implementations and licensing

Several commercial implementations of Open Firmware have been released to the Open Source community since 2006, including Sun OpenBoot, Firmworks OpenFirmware and Codegen SmartFirmware. The source code is available from the

BSD license.[citation needed
]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Apple Wiki - Open Firmware".
  2. ISBN 978-0-7381-1194-0
    .
  3. ISBN 9780130224965
    .
  4. ^
    hdl:10012/5234
    . Document ID: ab71498b6b1a60ff817b29d56997a418.
  5. ^ "Sun Enterprise 250 Server Owner's Guide > Chapter 12 Diagnostics and Troubleshooting > About OpenBoot Diagnostics (OBDiag)". Archived from the original on 7 March 2021.

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