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Prior to the development and ubiquitous adoption of the Plug and Play BIOS standard, an add-on device such as a hard disk controller or a network adapter card (NIC) was generally required to include an option ROM in order to be bootable, as the motherboard BIOS did not include any support for the device and so could not incorporate it into the BIOS's boot protocol.
In this way, it can provide boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware.
SeaBIOS is an open-source implementation of an x86 BIOS, serving as a freely available firmware for x86 systems. Aiming for compatibility, it supports standard BIOS features and calling interfaces that are implemented by a typical proprietary x86 BIOS.
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.
The second-stage boot loader does not need drivers for its own operation, but may instead use generic storage access methods provided by system firmware such as the BIOS, though typically with restricted hardware functionality and lower performance. [13] In x86 computers, third-stage bootloaders are include IO.SYS, NTLDR, BOOTMGR and GRUB.
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. Available on Itanium-based computers only. [24]
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When a system on a chip (SoC) enters suspend to RAM mode, in many cases, the processor is completely off while the RAM is put in self refresh mode. At resume, the boot ROM is executed again and many boot ROMs are able to detect that the SoC was in suspend to RAM and can resume by jumping directly to the kernel which then takes care of powering on again the peripherals which were off and ...