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by olive247 1350 days ago
This talk just made me realize how little I understand about what the firmware is really doing. I had previously understood the BIOS to be a small piece of firmware that runs the bootloader at startup and maybe some other coordination between other hardware devices and the CPU. Then CPU takes over and the firmware takes a backseat. The speaker mentioned a whole can of firmware worms that I had no idea even existed.

I’m interested to see the progress of open source firmware now.
2 comments
mlindner 1349 days ago
You should check out this other talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo . It goes into a bunch of details about how many parts there are inside modern SoCs.
link
soneil 1350 days ago
That's pretty much where I'm at - my understanding of most of this hasn't moved since CP/M.

CPU boots, PC sets to zero, starts reading instructions from ROM, optionally paging out the ROM if we really need to recover that memory window. I get that x86 is a bit messier because you have optional bioses that get run, and then you read and run the first page of the storage device, but .. man have they made life difficult since I last paid attention.

link