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Sadly everything that's come since x86 has done bootstrapping much more device-specifically and it always comes with signed bootloaders. If you're lucky you ca
by wyldfire 8y ago
Sadly everything that's come since x86 has done bootstrapping much more device-specifically and it always comes with signed bootloaders. If you're lucky you can opt-out. RISC-V will likely be designed with the goal of eliminating royalties, not making extensible/portable bootloaders.
- chriswarbo 8y agoI was a fan of OpenFirmware, which AFAIK was royalty-free and cross-platform (with a layer of Forth abstracting between software and hardware)
- zzo38computer 8y agoAnother thing that it is useful with Forth is that it means that even if there is no operating system it is able to boot, still the computer will be usable.
- est31 8y agoI think Microsoft was actually a force for standardization here: they didn't want to make multiple versions of Windows for multiple IBM PC implementations. So everything is designed in a way that you can have one OS image that boots on a wide range of hardware. Now compare that to ARM :). Here basically every device/SoC family needs its own linux build.
- pjmlp 8y agoMicrosoft used to have PC specification guides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide
- nickik 8y agoIts absolutely a goal of RISC-V to make it friendly to good bootloaders and there are lots and lots of discussion going on how these interfaces should look. This stuff is still in flux but go into working groups for privilege architecture and security and you will see all these discussions. RISC-V was never and will never be designed with the goal of eliminating royalties.