OpenBIOS

OpenBIOS is a free, portable implementation of the Open Firmware standard for firmware that is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. OpenBIOS can currently be used in conjunction with coreboot to Intel - compatible systems, as well as firmware SPARC emulation in QEMU.

Use on Intel - compatible systems

On Intel - compatible systems OpenBIOS can be used in conjunction with coreboot. coreboot initializes the hardware, and then passes control to OpenBIOS, which offers an open- firmware environment, with the further start procedure can be controlled.

Use of this combination is problematic since there is no official standard for Open Firmware on the IA32 platform, and accordingly the support of the Open Firmware interfaces is not given by the operating system to load.

Use in QEMU / SPARC

OpenBIOS is the default firmware for the SPARC QEMU emulation of the software and has been adapted to the emulation environment.

Other Open Firmware implementations

With time, more open- firmware implementations have been released as open source:

• Code gene SmartFirmware
• Sun Microsystems Open Boat, with the publication of Sun4v ( UltraSPARC T1, or " Niagara " )
• Firm 's open firmware as part of the $ 100 laptop project

All three implementations have been released under the BSD license and have experience unlike OpenBIOS years of productive use. Smart firmware and Open Firmware hosted by OpenBIOS project, OpenBoot provided a copy.

Furthermore, IBM developed another variant called Slimline Open Firmware ( SLOF ).

Open Firmware Tools

Belonging to OpenBIOS editing tools FCode (see Open Firmware ) are now also used by other open firmware developers.