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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.
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.
A PBA environment serves as an extension of the BIOS, UEFI or boot firmware and guarantees a secure, tamper-proof environment external to the operating system as a trusted authentication layer. [2] The PBA prevents any operating system from loading until the user has confirmed he/she has the correct password to unlock the computer. [2]
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a successor to the legacy PC BIOS, aiming to address its technical limitations. [5] UEFI firmware may include legacy BIOS compatibility to maintain compatibility with operating systems and option cards that do not support UEFI native operation.
The BIOS boot partition is a partition on a data storage device that GNU GRUB uses on legacy BIOS-based personal computers in order to boot an operating system, when the actual boot device contains a GUID Partition Table (GPT). Such a layout is sometimes referred to as BIOS/GPT boot.
The Video BIOS provides some basic display services for BIOS and operating systems, for example INT 10H (Legacy BIOS), VBE (Legacy BIOS) and UEFI GOP. The original IBM PC BIOS included integrated support for the IBM CGA and MDA video adapters (and did not support option ROMs at all), so those video cards had no option ROMs.
UEFI machines can have one of the following classes, which were used to help ease the transition to UEFI: [96] Class 0: Legacy BIOS; Class 1: UEFI with a CSM interface and no external UEFI interface. The only UEFI interfaces are internal to the firmware. Class 2: UEFI with CSM and external UEFI interfaces, eg. UEFI Boot.
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]