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Open Firmware is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun Microsystems where it was known as OpenBoot , and has been used by multiple vendors including Sun , Apple , [ 1 ] IBM and ARM .
OpenBIOS is a project aiming to provide free and open source implementations of Open Firmware. It is also the name of such an implementation. It is also the name of such an implementation. Most of the implementations provided by OpenBIOS rely on additional lower-level firmware for hardware initialization, such as coreboot or Das U-Boot .
The open-source community increased their effort to develop a replacement for proprietary BIOSes and their future incarnations with an open-sourced counterparts. Open Firmware was an early attempt to make an open specification for boot firmware.
Flashrom is a software utility published under an open source license that can detect, read, verify, erase, or write EEPROMs using interfaces such as the Low Pin Count (LPC), FWH, parallel, and Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). It can be used to flash firmware images such as BIOS or coreboot, or to backup existing firmware.
Also, version 3.0 (as well as some of the last releases of version 2.x, starting with the PowerBook 3400) officially supported direct access to the Open Firmware command prompt from the console (by setting the auto-boot? variable to false from Mac OS, or by holding down ⌘ Command-⌥ Option-O-F at boot).
Common Firmware Environment (CFE), sometimes pronounced as 'cafe', [1] is a firmware interface and bootloader developed by Broadcom for 32-bit and 64-bit system-on-a-chip systems. It is intended to be a flexible toolkit of CPU initialization and bootstrap code for use on embedded processors (typically running on MIPS32/64 instruction set CPUs ...
As originally used, firmware contrasted with hardware (the CPU itself) and software (normal instructions executing on a CPU). It was not composed of CPU machine instructions, but of lower-level microcode involved in the implementation of machine instructions. It existed on the boundary between hardware and software; thus the name firmware.
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