4 ms·
My understanding is that the PC is actually the odd one out there. Many pre-UEFI devices (PowerPC Macs, Sun SPARC boxen, etc) ran Open Firmware, which used devi
by don-code 2y ago
My understanding is that the PC is actually the odd one out there. Many pre-UEFI devices (PowerPC Macs, Sun SPARC boxen, etc) ran Open Firmware, which used device-independent bytecode in their boot ROMs. You could swap the graphics card out of a Mac and put it in a Sun machine, and things would work. PCs, on the other hand, put x86 machine code directly in the boot ROM.
- ch_123 2y agoDEC Alpha systems solved this problem by using an x86 emulator during system boot to run the initialization code, thus allowing for standard PC cards to be used on a non x86 processor. (Reference to this in some early RedHat documentation, which is about as authoritative of a source I could find in 2-3 mins of Googling: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat-4.0/axp/azstarnet/docs/FAQ-10.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/red...)