I wouldn’t really call IEEE-1275 Open Firmware a “BIOS competitor” so much as an actual attempt to standardize firmware. By all rights, EFI, UEFI, and all the

I wouldn’t really call IEEE-1275 Open Firmware a “BIOS competitor” so much as an actual attempt to standardize firmware. By all rights, EFI, UEFI, and all the various random boot loaders shouldn’t exist because a manufacturer can just leverage one of a number of independent, interoperable implementations of the standard and support booting arbitrary software on their systems. Despite not being large and quite well-designed, about the only thing that’s survived from IEEE-1275 into the modern era has been the “device tree” concept. But that can still change! There are Open Source implementations of Open Firmware these days, they’re rather straightforward to bootstrap, and since so much of the higher levels are implemented in FORTH and the lower levels in platform-independent C, you get a lot of bang for the buck in adopting it, including things like booting from an arbitrary IP network or arbitrary local storage, using an arbitrary text or graphics device for output, and using arbitrary devices for input. All it needs is a set of straightforward drivers for the local hardware, since it doesn’t need to be super-fast.