Open Firmware

This is an implementation of Open Firmware, a processor-independent firmware design. Open Firmware is specified by IEEE 1275-1994, Standard for Boot (Initialization, Configuration) Firmware. The IEEE standard designation lapsed in 1999, when the Open Firmware working group declined to go through the rather time-consuming IEEE reaffirmation process, but the design lives on. This implementation was written primarily by Mitch Bradley, the original author of Open Firmware. The bulk of the recent development was done at Firmworks by Bradley and colleagues. It traces its roots back to the original Open Boot firmware implementation that Bradley developed at Sun Microsystems in the late 80s and early 90s. That in turn had roots in Forthmacs, a Forth programming language implementation developed and marketed during the early 80s by Bradley Forthware. And Forthmacs, in turn, owes a debt of gratitude to the public domain Forth implementations F83, developed by Michael Perry, and MVP Forth, by Glen Haydon. Lilian Walter wrote the USB stack. This Open Firmware implementation has been ported to quite a few different CPUs and platforms. The initial release contains the processor-independent core code, x86 CPU support, drivers for some common PC peripherals, and the current version of the port to the One Laptop per Child computer. The support code for other CPUs and devices, and documentation, will be released as time permits.