Very soon Genesi plans to introduce the following:

__OpenPowerArchitecture__ ...or OPA

An Open Hardware/Software System Architecture Reference

1)   Mission

a. The mission of OPA is to provide a flexible and scaleable hardware abstraction layer for PowerPC driven devices. The scope is to cover a wide range of devices, ranging from Smart Phones to SMP server blades. As a well defined interface between hardware and software OPA will bring benefits to both sides of the system design. Building OPA compliant hardware will instantly enable this system to run all the OPA compliant software (e.g. various operating systems available for the OPA, including LINUX, BSD, QNX, VxWorks and others). The hardware vendor has no longer the need to develop or license various support packages for all the different operating systems.  Likewise, software developers do not need to attend to all the requirements of all possible platforms. Supporting one OPA system means supporting every OPA system. This means that even a specialized design of custom hardware that is built in a total quantity of ten units has instant access to all the operating systems and software that are OPA compliant. Using OPA will bring down system development time and cost in reasonable way while speeding up time to market. OS vendors will be enabled to support systems at release time by providing one OPA version.

b. Learning from the mistakes of CHRP, PREP and POP...etc.
 
c. Strategic concept: Economies do not grow strong by restricting the flow of information; they grow strong by sharing ideas and building upon the work of others. In fact, all of mankind’s greatest inventors built upon the work of their predecessors. There is no work that has not built upon the previous knowledge of others at all; we could not write these words were we unable to build upon the lingual knowledge that has preceded our existence upon this globe.

2)  Concept of the Method -- Defining the OPA interface

This will be used as the only software/hardware interface of a OPA compliant system. A OPA system:

 HARDWARE<->FIRMWARE<->OPA interface<->OS

Please note that in the meaning of OPA the firmware is treated as hardware part of the system. All pieces used to build the OPA interface are built out from open standards and free of any patents and licenses. Any IP created outside of known and freely available standards (like PCI, IEEE1275, etc.) should by trademarked, patented or otherwise secured in the name of OpenPowerArchitecture.org. or OpenPowerArchitecture.com (we have registered both) then can license this IP with at symbolic fee of $1 (??? -- with "copyleft" agreement). We have actually thought about placing this in a Foundation (and have had a suggestion of an endowment!).

OPA will have a total of three function sets:

a. Minimum required functions:

The minimum functions for a OPA system include a device tree, IO access, system control, etc. These are to be used by the OPA OS.

b.  Optional functions

These OPA functions are hardware implementation and/or system vendor specific. As an example, an OPA hardware implementation of a embedded system like a smart phone or a game boy type of device has no need of SMP control functions as needed for a multi CPU server blade. These are to be used by the OPA OS.

c. User functions

While maintaining the calling conventions of OPA functions, this type of functionality are fully hardware vendor specific and can be used to control special custom hardware, etc. The OPA OS will never use these functions, but will provide a API to allow special applications accessing these functions.

3) Business Model

a. OPA.org provides the standard itself and does the needed licensing stuff at various levels (e.g. single user, commercial customer, schools, non profit organizations, etc).

b. OPA.com provides reference implementations of the OPA standard that can be used for evaluation, design and verification. These implementations are available for licensing to enable a customer to build an OPA compliant system without be required to do a complete development from the beginning.

This includes:

i)    a hardware reference design

ii)    a firmware reference design

iii)    a OS reference design

Any feedback is welcome. We have posted this on a number of sites!

R&B

What are the advantages over Openfirmware ?

Wow!

Erm, would you like this posted under the news?

What does this mean to the current install base of Pegasos owners?

For the moment not much, but in the not too distant future we hope this brings added value to your ownership!

R&B

This sounds very much like Amiga Incs Amiga DE, system agnostic, etc.

Thank you for reminding us about Genesi's new strategy to gather market share. I still have a problem, tho: Is OPA mainly SmartFirmware, I mean, is Genesi entering the BIOS market? By the way, I think SmartFirmware is lovely, even more with those misterious network boot abilities it seems to have.
I guess Genesi just wanted to leverage bPlan's work adapting CodeGen's SmartFirmware, which can be a hell of a product by itself.

Or, I could have it wrong completely...