Open Firmware

[citation needed] Open Firmware allows a system to load platform-independent drivers directly from a PCI device, improving compatibility.

[2] Open Firmware defines a standard way to describe the hardware configuration of a system, called the device tree.

A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system.

Being based upon an interactive programming language, Open Firmware can be used to efficiently test and bring up new hardware.

Sun also shipped an FCode-based diagnostic tool suite called OpenBoot Diagnostics (OBDiag) used by customer service support and hardware manufacturing teams[5] Several commercial implementations of Open Firmware have been released to the Open Source community since 2006, including Sun OpenBoot, Firmworks OpenFirmware and Codegen SmartFirmware.