No, they don't. Read again, I was referring to methods of
cross-platform POST stuff (emphasis on cross-platform), such as Open
Firmware does. Basically OF implements a FORTH VM that the card
firmware executes on, and thus the same card can init itself on any
platform that (a) uses OF and (b) has the right bus.
I don't know the whole story but I suspect that PC BIOS people never
got interested in doing OF because all hardware vendors who wanted to
hawk cards for PC users were already using Intel code for their BIOS
hooks. (And screw those Mac users anyway.) Pragmatically, it seems
the OSF/1-on-Alpha people chose to write an x86 VM to leverage this,
rather than license an implementation of OF with its FORTH approach.
Peter
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