RE: Programatically determining BootROM version?
RE: Programatically determining BootROM version?
- Subject: RE: Programatically determining BootROM version?
- From: Kevin Elliott <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:38:20 -0700
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...
--
______________________________________________________
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud.
After a while, you realize the pig is enjoying it.
______________________________________________________
Kevin Elliott <mailto:email@hidden>
AIM/iChatAV: email@hidden (video chat available)
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