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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.
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 plug-and-play functions used to access the structures from Windows 95. [7]
Standard PC BIOS is limited to a 16-bit processor mode and 1 MB of addressable memory space, resulting from the design based on the IBM 5150 that used a 16-bit Intel 8088 processor. [8] [34] In comparison, the processor mode in a UEFI environment can be either 32-bit (IA-32, AArch32) or 64-bit (x86-64, Itanium, and AArch64).
UEFI support in Windows began in 2008 with Windows Vista SP1. [22] The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive.
Examples of first-stage (hardware initialization stage) boot loaders include BIOS, UEFI, coreboot, Libreboot and Das U-Boot. On the IBM PC, the boot loader in the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the Partition Boot Record (PBR) was coded to require at least 32 KB [51] [52] (later expanded to 64 KB [53]) of system memory and only use instructions ...
The first stage of PC boot loaders (FSBL, first-stage boot loader) located on fixed disks and removable drives must fit into the first 446 bytes of the master boot record in order to leave room for the default 64-byte partition table with four partition entries and the two-byte boot signature, which the BIOS requires for a proper boot loader ...
Details of GPT support on 32-bit editions of Microsoft Windows [31] OS version Release date Platform Read or write support Boot support Note Windows 9x: 1995-08-24 IA-32: No [b] No Windows XP: 2001-10-25 IA-32 No No Windows Server 2003: 2003-04-24 IA-32 No No Windows Server 2003 SP1: 2005-03-30 IA-32 Yes No MBR takes precedence in hybrid ...
A modern PC with a bus rate of around 1 GHz and a 32-bit bus might be 2000x or even 5000x faster, but might have many more gigabytes of memory. With boot times more of a concern now than in the 1980s, the 30- to 60-second memory test adds undesirable delay for a benefit of confidence that is not perceived to be worth that cost by most users.