ARM as a primary architecture

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 03:32:15PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> 
> > Given that the "pc" sense of BIOS includes having arguments returned in 
> > x86 registers, I really don't think that's true.
> 
> ARM has registers too...
> 
> My point is, the ARM chips *do* support an on-board flash bootloader,
> and there's no reason why that bootloader couldn't export a standard
> ABI that uses interrupts and register passing, and boot off a standard
> attached disk...

I think you misunderstood Richard. ARM hardware is moving towards 
adopting UEFI as the standard firmware interface, which is BIOS-like in 
the sense that you're describing. Richard was explicitly talking about 
BIOS-as-in-x86-asm-and-int-calls being preferable to UEFI. There's no 
real way ARM could implement the latter.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org