Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 12:06:35 -0800 From: Parag Patel <parag@cgt.com> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> Cc: Mikael Karpberg <karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se>, mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New boot loader and alternate kernels Message-ID: <199811012006.MAA17513@pinhead.parag.codegen.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 01 Nov 1998 16:01:00 %2B0100." <18026.909932460@critter.freebsd.dk>
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In message <18026.909932460@critter.freebsd.dk>, Poul-Henning Kamp writes: >The "Open" boot prom on Suns and the various spinoffs from that use >forth for that reason. It's compact, it can be made machine independent >and there is a standard (several actually) so you don't have to invent >the host plate and the deep water all over again. Well, that was the original intention, but if you look at the OpenFirmware standard (IEEE-1275), the added stuff greatly expands the size. Our C implementation (SmartFirmware) is actually smaller than their native Forth implementation, both in code size and run-time data size (which was a big surprise to us) but is still bigger than a traditional Forth implementation. IEEE-1275 adds quite a lot on top of the ANS Forth spec. I think the main reason they went to Forth is to support plug-in boot ROMs using a byte-coded Forth called Fcode. It's the best choice if you want to have a machine-independent boot ROM on a plug-in card. They could have gone with a byte-encoded Lisp or BASIC or anything else, but Sun has a tendancy to base systems around Forth for some reason (Openview, Java, etc :-). -- Parag Patel To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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