At 16:24 -0600 11/7/99, Donald Lee wrote:

>
>o	The main (only?) reason to have forth/OFW drivers in the ROM on a
>	PCI card is if you want to use the card at boot time.
>	The OFW drivers (in theory) will work at boot time regardless
>	of the OS being booted.  Once the OS is up, these OFW
>	drivers are useless.

One minor nit - there is a port in the NetBSD source tree called 
"ofppc" which uses the OF device drivers for I/O in "normal" 
operation. Now, these drivers are interpreted, and as such are not 
all that zippy, but as a way to get a NetBSD kernel going on a 
platform without writing lots of device drivers, this is one way to 
go.

The catch where Apple is concerned is that their OF implementation 
has generally been so poor that this sort thing is not likely to 
work. I just wanted to point out that while Apple's OF implementation 
may make this impossible, it has been made to work on other platforms.

	in service of accuracy,

	Erik <fair@clock.org>