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Typical POST screen (AMI BIOS) Typical UEFI-compliant BIOS POST screen (Phoenix Technologies BIOS) Summary screen after POST and before booting an operating system (AMI BIOS) A power-on self-test ( POST ) is a process performed by firmware or software routines immediately after a computer or other digital electronic device is powered on.
In computing, the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures (and access methods) that can be used to read management information produced by the BIOS of a computer. [1] This eliminates the need for the operating system to probe hardware directly to discover what devices are present in the computer.
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS. In its usual use, it is essentially a driver ...
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto configuration (e.g. Plug and Play and hot swapping), and status monitoring.
It also contains a command-line interface, which makes it easier to fix or modify GRUB if it is misconfigured or corrupt. [16] Loadlin is a bootloader that can replace a running DOS or Windows 9x kernel with the Linux kernel at run time. This can be useful in the case of hardware that needs to be switched on via software and for which such ...
For this reason, later BIOS implementations may use a small portion of BIOS flash ROM as NVRAM, to store setup data. [7] Today's UEFI motherboards use NVRAM to store configuration data (NVRAM is a portion of the UEFI flash ROM), but by many OEMs' design, the UEFI settings are still lost if the CMOS battery fails. [8] [9]
e820 is shorthand for the facility by which the BIOS of an x86-based computer system reports the memory map to the operating system or boot loader. [1] It is accessed via the int 15h call, by setting the AX register to value E820 in hexadecimal. It reports which memory address ranges are usable and which are reserved for use by the BIOS. [2]
Advanced power management (APM) is a technical standard for power management developed by Intel and Microsoft and released in 1992 [1] which enables an operating system running an IBM-compatible personal computer to work with the BIOS (part of the computer's firmware) to achieve power management.