Re: Giving Up on Leopard
- From: dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson)
- Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 20:58:49 +1300
The Translucent Amoebae <transamoebae@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maybe this could be The Rallying Call to adopt a Firmware Approach to
Any Given Computer's OS...!
In this scenario; The OS, which would be so Invisible from the users
Perspective, that it wouldn't even have a name, that anyone, but geeks
would have any knowledge of...
The OS would be PLUGGED IN to a covered slot somewhere on the
computer, and then adapt itself with a detected HD and local memory
area...
Guess what? That's basically how the Mac started out. It had most of the
operating system in ROM. Completely unchangeable short of pulling out
the chip and swapping in a new one (which Apple did with the Mac SE and
Mac II to add support for high-density floppy drives).
This approach would just about ensure that No Virus or Worm or
anything like that, could ever attack it, and it would also mean that
the computer would start up instantaneously after every shut down...
i can't, for the life of me, imagine WHY Computer OS's are still
software driven, And That NO Computer manufacturer has taken this
FirmWare Approach...???
The original Mac design did not work well as a means to protect the
operating system from being modified.
Firstly, there were bugs in the ROM (no complex software is bug-free).
Since the ROM wasn't changeable, and the programmers were smart enough
to know that they couldn't write perfect code, that meant they had to
include a mechanism to supersede the buggy code in ROM with a
replacement version loaded from disk.
Secondly, the operating system as supplied with the computer was limited
in functionality. They couldn't anticipate everything that anyone might
ever want to do with the computer, so it was necessary to extend the
functionality of the code in ROM by loading yet more code from disk.
After which, you are back to square one in terms of "unmodifiable" code.
Around 1998, Apple abandoned this approach, and switched to a completely
"software" operating system loaded from disk (as of the first iMac).
The ROM (now a Flash ROM, able to be reprogrammed a limited number of
times) contains sufficient code to support the built-in peripherals and
major devices which can be connected via USB, and enough code to boot an
operating system from disk, but doesn't have much in the way of user
interface support.
The firmware in the original iMac got updated something like four times
over its lifetime, to fix a few bugs and add some minor features. Later
models had even more features in their firmware (e.g. Firewire support,
and the startup disk selector).
It's not like it's impossible...
Every other electronic game system, cell phone, programmable
calculator, toaster oven, medical device, printer/scanner and so on,
take this approach...???
Most of those devices have one dedicated purpose, a limited user
interface, and seriously limited expansion capability. It is much easier
to write a stable operating system for a fixed purpose device than it is
for a general purpose device like a computer.
The ones which have a degree of expansion capability also tend to have
reprogrammable firmware which needs to be updated to add support for new
features.
Merely having the operating system in firmware is NOT a protection
against bad software like viruses. Cellphones based on the Symbian
operating system were affected by a virus which could spread to other
phones running the same operating system (via Bluetooth, if I remember
right).
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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