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Award BIOS setup utility on a standard PC. A modern BIOS setup utility has a text user interface (TUI) or graphical user interface (GUI) accessed by pressing a certain key on the keyboard when the PC starts. Usually, the key is advertised for short time during the early startup, for example "Press DEL to enter Setup".
Version 1 of the Desktop Management BIOS (DMIBIOS) specification was produced by Phoenix Technologies in or before 1996. [5] [6] Version 2.0 of the Desktop Management BIOS specification was released on March 6, 1996 by American Megatrends (AMI), Award Software, Dell, Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and SystemSoft Corporation. It introduced 16-bit ...
The Extended System Configuration Data (ESCD) is a specification for configuring x86 computers of the ISA PNP era. The specification was developed by Compaq, Intel and Phoenix Technologies. It consists of a method for storing configuration information in nonvolatile BIOS memory and three BIOS functions for working with that data. [1] [2]
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.
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
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 was first released in ...
On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.
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]