Genesi is pleased to announce that it will provide under license the Pegasos hardware abstraction layer and IEEE 1275 compliant Open Firmware (HAL/OF) for Marvell Discovery II and Discovery III Development Boards.

The Pegasos HAL/OF approach brings with it immediate GNU/Linux kernel support as well as support from a growing number Linux distributions. MorphOS is also supported and an OpenSolaris PowerPC port is also underway. The Pegasos HAL/OF has been used and is being used to support PowerPC-based platforms utilizing the Discovery II and the Discovery III northbridges.

The Pegasos HAL/OF approach enables the vast software resources currently available on the Open Desktop Workstation to be shared with other PowerPC-based platforms. The Open Desktop Workstation is a CHRP compliant platform based on the PegasosPPC and composed of standard PC components. The Pegasos HAL/OF provides a logical successor to the CHRP standard replacing hardware dependent code with API callbacks to an abstraction layer that provides a common interface to operating systems and/or applications as required.