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RE: Programatically determining BootROM version?

At 10:55 -0700 on 7/17/06, David Litwin wrote:
I suppose relying on the system_profiler app to exist and be in the same location is about >as brittle as expecting the Boot ROM information to be in a certain place in the IORegistry >(different on two platforms at this point), but has the added advantage of being a >common method to retrieve the info and touches it up for the user to view. 

Sorry to jump in late, but this caught my eye...

One of the things to understand about IORegistry is that "location" is a completely meaningless concept between different machines, much less between different architectures. The IORegistry closely models the underlying hardware and thus looks VERY different between various machines. However, that doesn't mean keys are necessarily brittle- key names generally don't change and are attached to appropriate base classes, even is the final class is different (to adapt to architecture changes).

Are the key names the same between Intel and PPC? I could go either way on this... on the one hand a firmware version is a firmware version, but on the other hand OpenFimrware and EFI (I think that's what Intel uses...) couldn't be more different. If the key names are the same, I don't think a simple search of the entire registry would be inappropriate- it's a lot faster than it sounds and the code involved isn't that bad. Let me know if you'd like an example. Even if the keys are different, I'm still not sure a full registry search would be inappropriate. After all, this is only the second time in +20 years that Apple has switched architectures. I hate to offer predictions, but I think it's a fairly safe bet that Apple won't be announcing a switch to SPARC at WWDC...
--
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 >RE: Programatically determining BootROM version? (From: "David Litwin" <email@hidden>)



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