Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) [3] is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any given processor's native bus.
One of the major improvements the PCI Local Bus had over other I/O architectures was its configuration mechanism. In addition to the normal memory-mapped and I/O port spaces, each device function on the bus has a configuration space, which is 256 bytes long, addressable by knowing the eight-bit PCI bus, five-bit device, and three-bit function numbers for the device (commonly referred to as the ...
Windows 10 is a version of Windows NT and the successor of Windows 8.1. Some features of the operating system were removed in comparison to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, and further changes in features offered have occurred within subsequent feature updates to Windows 10. Following is a list of these.
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.
Screenshot of the Syskey utility on the Windows 8.1 operating system requesting the user to enter a password.. The SAM Lock Tool, better known as Syskey (the name of its executable file), is a discontinued component of Windows NT that encrypts the Security Account Manager (SAM) database using a 128-bit RC4 encryption key.
In computing, a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) is a hardware interrupt that standard interrupt-masking techniques in the system cannot ignore. It typically occurs to signal attention for non-recoverable hardware errors.
Being message-based (at the PCI Express layer), this mechanism provides some, but not all, of the advantages of the PCI layer MSI mechanism: the 4 virtual pins per device are no longer shared on the bus (although PCI Express controllers may still combine legacy interrupts internally), and interrupt changes no longer inherently suffer from race ...
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 ...