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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 ...
American Megatrends Inc., doing business as AMI, is an international hardware and software company, specializing in PC hardware and firmware. [3] The company was founded in 1985 by Pat Sarma and Subramonian Shankar. [ 4 ]
This BIOS enabled OEMs to build essentially fully compatible clones without having to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS themselves, as Compaq had done for the Portable; it also helped fuel the growth in the PC-compatibles industry and sales of non-IBM versions of DOS. [69] The first American Megatrends (AMI) BIOS was released in 1986.
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 ...
OpenBIOS is a project aiming to provide free and open source implementations of Open Firmware. It is also the name of such an implementation. It is also the name of such an implementation. Most of the implementations provided by OpenBIOS rely on additional lower-level firmware for hardware initialization, such as coreboot or Das U-Boot .
Open Firmware defines a standard way to describe the hardware configuration of a system, called the device tree. [3] This helps the operating system to better understand the configuration of the host computer, relying less on user configuration and hardware polling.
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.
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.