Nope. No more OpenFirmware. This makes me rather sad in a way, since I've still got that OF Towers Of Hanoi game around here somewhere. Oh well.
EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface. That's a link to the Wikipedia article on it. The interesting thing about EFI is that it's rather similar to OF in a number of ways. For example:
Ideally, the EFI development model will extend the concept of hardware drivers to the lowest level of the PC structure. Currently all motherboard device initialization is done through a BIOS designed by a BIOS vendor. With the EFI model, however, manufacturers of motherboard hardware will be free to write their own hardware drivers, akin to how companies write OS device drivers for their products. Among other things, this frees EFI to initialize all hardware before turning control over to the OS. This feature could be used, for example, to allow the PC to connect to the Internet and retrieve drivers before an OS is even installed.
Sounds awfully similar to the Forth dictionaries that OpenFirmware cards have, doesn't it?
Of course, it also says "Designed for use with trusted computing, it allows vendors to create drivers which cannot be reverse engineered.", though it doesn't require "trusted computing".
Seems like an attempt to get OpenFirmware-like capabilities into a BIOS that can still boot Windows.
EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface. That's a link to the Wikipedia article on it. The interesting thing about EFI is that it's rather similar to OF in a number of ways. For example:
Ideally, the EFI development model will extend the concept of hardware drivers to the lowest level of the PC structure. Currently all motherboard device initialization is done through a BIOS designed by a BIOS vendor. With the EFI model, however, manufacturers of motherboard hardware will be free to write their own hardware drivers, akin to how companies write OS device drivers for their products. Among other things, this frees EFI to initialize all hardware before turning control over to the OS. This feature could be used, for example, to allow the PC to connect to the Internet and retrieve drivers before an OS is even installed.
Sounds awfully similar to the Forth dictionaries that OpenFirmware cards have, doesn't it?
Of course, it also says "Designed for use with trusted computing, it allows vendors to create drivers which cannot be reverse engineered.", though it doesn't require "trusted computing".
Seems like an attempt to get OpenFirmware-like capabilities into a BIOS that can still boot Windows.
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