That is how the original IBM PC BIOS worked with basic hardware, more or less. Both Open Firmware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipe

That is how the original IBM PC BIOS worked with basic hardware, more or less. Both Open Firmware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware) and EFI (http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver_Presentation.pdf http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver...) include a bytecode interpreter for portable device drivers - the idea is that the hardware device stores the driver as bytecode, the Open Firmware controller loads that driver bytecode when the device is plugged in and uses the CPU to execute it, and provides a uniform API to the OS. From what I read EFI was developed at Intel to be a deliberately incompatible Open Firmware clone for the Itanium. There really is not that much savings or advantage to this approach so there are not a lot of Open Firmware and EFI drivers out there. You really do not want hardware manufacturers writing drivers either - they tend to be terrible and full of bugs. Having the manufacturer publish the hardware specifications so that drivers can be easily implemented by developers is a much better approach, sadly a lot of manufacturers cannot be bothered with this.