Subject: Re: Device Tree

From: Matt Sealey <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:08:28 -0500

Gerald Van Baren wrote:
> Matt Sealey wrote:
 >>
>> The Toshiba TOPAS910 ARM development board also runs Open Firmware and
>> contains patches to support OF device trees.
>>
>> I dare say there might be an x86 box or two out there, too. But they
>> have ACPI tables too which is far more common..
> 
> More than a box or two: lots of OLPC XOs out there now.  ;-)
>     <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware>

I was thinking more in a platform kind of numbers rather than a sales
kind of numbers, but you're right.

It's far more common than people might think at first glance. With x86
I am sure it would benefit the platform a little more if the OF support
was in-line with the shared code between PPC and SPARC (and now I guess,
ARM) but nevertheless it's an Open Firmware platform and something that
appeared not too long ago.

OF is still a going concern; if you want a nice flexible firmware, why
not use it? Most of the implementations are open source (FirmWorks and
CodeGen trees, and the Sun reference design) too.

-- 
Matt Sealey <[email-masked]>
Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations