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Intel Operating Systems BSD

EFI'ing And Blinding 30

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Diamonds-on-the-soles-of-her-shoes dept.
In another installment of the "BSD code popping up in odd places story", Intel are promulgating the Extensible Firmware Interface, a new abstraction layer for the "operating system and platform firmware". As this PDF slideshow shows, libc in the EFI layer is from FreeBSD (page 9), as is the TCP/IP stack (page 11). Finally Intel appear to be releasing the whole thing under something very close to a BSD license (page 15). Which is nice.
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EFI'ing And Blinding More

EFI'ing And Blinding

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  • I wasn't saying that there aren't any ps viewers.
    I was just saying that on most of the computers I am running, there isn't.
    And I can't install on those, unless I have administrator access. This is NT boxes at my university.
  • Why not just use OpenFirmware ?

    Maybe Intel engineers had a bad experience with Pascal in school.

  • Actually, Sun started out way back when with the BSD code, calling it SunOS 3 and later, 4. SunOS 4 was pretty close to ancient BSD.

    Then, Sun had the brilliant idea to ditch the BSD code and instead use the yucky System V code as its basis for Solaris 2. It took them years to get the thing stable (2.5.1 is the first Solaris that I'd consider using for anything serious).

    Solaris is a serious OS these days, but it bears as much resemblance to BSD as Linux does. Right now, all three have evolved so far as to make any OS of the early ninetees look ancient.

    By the way, where do you get the "mortal enemy" bit from? Sun is a heavy invester in Intel based software. It's just Microsoft they're not big fans of.

  • You know, here's the thing about HTML fonts: they're a bad idea. They screw up a user's control over how a site is supposed to be viewed.

    IMHO vanilla HTML is probably the best cross-platform doc standard, followed by PDF if some kind of formatting is necessary (for example, an online version of a published book). PostScript is somewhat outdated for that purpose and should really be lumped in with troff and LaTeX as intermediate formats, not really suitable for public consumption.

    /Brian

  • And I can't install on those, unless I have administrator access.

    If the designers of NT had any smarts, they would have added a feature where users can install software to their own account (think of ~/bin/ ).

  • Forth is a postfix (reverse polish notation) language. So is PostScript. So is the HP calc language.

    Postmodernist Obscurantism to make code as unreadable as possible!

    Not all that unreadable to Fith [langmaker.com] speakers.

  • ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGH! Don't use that word!

    Fourth Generation Language indeed! More like -1th generation language - Postmodernist Obscurantism to make code as unreadable as possible!

  • fat12, fat16 and fat32 are the filesystems intel picked ... and they therefore use the slash of the Devil, aka the backslash.

    The fat filesystem can be used with whatever directory separator your FS implemetation supports. Try mounting your winpartition from a eunuchs-like operating system that supports it (Linux does, but does *BSD?) and accessing it with eunuchs-style forward slash.

    UNIX® is a trademark; eunuchs is not.
  • One was written to support the ia64 Linux port. You can find it at http://eli.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]. It is specific to ia64 right now, however an ia32 is planned. It is also a little rough around the edges, but this is being worked on. It is GPL'd (like I mentioned in the topic) for those of you who prefer the GPL.
  • there is most definitely a better way to present equations: TeX

    I agree TeX is the only reasonable solution for creating equation laden documents. But TeX isn't a viewable format in itself (except for Knuth maybe). Comparing it to PDF is comparing apples to crays. You can publish TeX to HTML, PDF, PS, DVI, etc. I think the best option of those is PDF. I know the xxx.lanl.gov pre-print archives all of the papers in TeX, then generates viewable output on the fly.

    Why am I going on about this? I don't want to write my stupid ass papers.

  • This makes us wonder how this will affect the industry as a whole. If M$ makes a version of Windows that'll run on top of that, and AMD is able to adapt that code to their needs, they could probably drop the x86 emulation unit, and just make an EFI emulation unit, which could be changed to suit their needs and make better processor designs. I'm sure, since the code is open, that AMD will be able to make a good EFI interpreter for their RISC core and make some nice, streamlined processors in the future. What do y'all think about that?
  • I'll reiterate your previous post for you, Signal 11.

    Why are you guys using PDF? It's a proprietary standard.. kindof goes against the grain of free softwae, don't you think? Why not use TeX, HTML, or postscript?

    You do not even mention Adobe Acrobat. PDF is not a proprietary standard. PDF is an open specification, usable by anyone who wants to take the time to implement it. Kind of like HTML or TXT.

    I've read your previous complaints about moderation, Signal 11, but when you post in this manner (lying about you past post, troll-like), you serve only to strengthen the arguments of those against you.
  • Seems like Intel is finally going the right way.
    Releasing the specs to Itanium and now this.

    Great for the opensource world.

  • You're a troll, but..

    Let's see, one of the other recent BSD articles dealt with adding IPv6 support to OpenBSD, and that's existed in Linux for how long? Years? (Anyone have an exact figure?)

    It exists in OpenBSD since years too, and dunno where you got your facts but ping6 is not to be found on the Suse Linux I have at hand. The fact that tutorials on effectively using it appear now doesn't say that Ipv6 support just appeared.

    IPv6 support is not only having support in the kernel, without userland support it's worthless, and under Linux it seems to be the case.

    How's your USB support on a stable kernel anyway ? <g>

  • Is it just me, or... (Score:3)

    by Morbid Curiosity ( 156888 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @06:38AM (#1861197)
    ...does the phrase "Extensible Firmware Interface" sound a bit... y'know... Freudian?

  • BSD (Score:1)

    by Mr804 ( 12397 )
    It's nice to see BSD getting some spot light. I get a little sick of the "linux as an mp3 player" of the week thread.

  • I'm making a boot disk now. This sounds like one of the coolest things to happen to systems in a long time.
    Is there any likelyhood of this being used in ia32 bioses any time in the future? Would we be able to boot to Win98, NT, or Linux with this?
  • The scripting language in their toolkit is the open source scripting language Python:

    http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/toolki t_overview.htm

  • ... of course.

  • PDF isn't really that bad -- Adobe released the complete specs to it when they first released Acrobat. It's completely possible to write your own PDF reader/writer. Like xpdf and Ghostscript :-).

    That's not to say that other formats aren't better, but PDF is way better then Word .doc files, which tend to be seen as the real alternative by a lot of companies.

  • Re:Wrong. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Acrobat Reader is proprietary. The PDF standard is not, and, in fact, ghostscript happily reads PDF files, leaving out hyperlink functionality if it is present (hyperlinking doesn't really fit into the one-way rendering model of ghostscript - although maybe the Display Ghostscript project that's part of GNUStep could extend to Display PDF, bringing in the hyperlinking functionality and also Quartz-compatiblity (Apple Quartz is what you get when you swap PDF for PS in NeXTStep))
    Ghostscirpy even comes with ps2pdf and pdf2ps filters, for God's sake.
  • Postscript is owned by adobe, the same people who own PDF.

  • Open Firmware (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @07:13AM (#1861205)
    Why not just use OpenFirmware [openfirmware.org] ?

    It there , it's open ( more or less ) it's cross-platfrom compatible etc..

    It is used by sun , apple-ppc and motorola-ppc machines.


    David Balazic , http://surf.to/stein [surf.to]

  • When you use html there is no guarantee the person viewing it will have the correct fonts, screen resolution, etc etc. How many good free postscript viewers are there for windows? Maybe 2 or 3.
  • Could someone explain how this new system differs
    from the existing IEEE 1275 Open Firmware standard?
    Will it work on non-Intel architectures?
  • html would be good, but far too often companies use PDF for specs, manuals and so on.
    We usually get ps files at the university for old exams which plain sucks because most computers don't have software that lets you read ps.
    Acrobat Reader is freely available for about every os you could imagine.
    I would rather have pdf that TeX or ps.
  • I have found ps readerss on every platform you can imagine. Aladdin ps viewer works for linux windows and BSD I believe. I believe there is also a free viewer for mac but i am unsure
  • I'll reiterate my previous post: adobe acrobat is proprietary (and evil)

    Acrobat format is owned by Adobe, but you are free to implement it yourself, the specs are available on the Adobe web site. I have written several programs which generate PDF output. You can easily create PDF files from TeX or HTML. PDF is is basically a trimmed down, streaming Postscript format, what makes it evil? There certainly isn't a better way to present equations - HTML with a ton of inserted gifs doesn't cut it. I also find that the acrobat readers do a much better job of extracting text than ghostscript does on PS. Converting from PDF to PS is trivial and can be done with ghostscript, xpdf, or Acrobat Reader on UNIX. Yes, I am PDF's bitch, but only because it is a cool format.

    You deserve a good whack with a cluestick.

  • I believe that Open Firmware is based on Forth, not Pascal.
  • or... extremely fuckable interface ;)

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