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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 ...
Windows NT was originally designed for ARC-compatible platforms, relying on its boot manager support and providing only osloader.exe, a loading program accepting ordinary command-line arguments specifying Windows directory partition, location or boot parameters, which is launched by ARC-compatible boot manager when a user chooses to start specific Windows NT operating system.
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.
Bootloader unlocking is the process of disabling the bootloader security that makes secure boot possible. It can make advanced customizations possible, such as installing custom firmware . On smartphones , this can be a custom Android distribution or another mobile operating system .
Common Firmware Environment (CFE), sometimes pronounced as 'cafe', [1] is a firmware interface and bootloader developed by Broadcom for 32-bit and 64-bit system-on-a-chip systems. It is intended to be a flexible toolkit of CPU initialization and bootstrap code for use on embedded processors (typically running on MIPS32/64 instruction set CPUs ...
In Windows 3.x and 95/98/ME, the boot loader phase is handled by MS-DOS.During the boot phase, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are executed, along with the configuration settings files WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI.
In earlier BIOSes, up to around the turn of the millennium, the POST would perform a thorough test of all devices, including a complete memory test. This design by IBM was modeled after their larger mainframe systems, which would perform a complete hardware test as part of their cold-start process.
AUTOEXEC.BAT is a system file that was originally on DOS-type operating systems.It is a plain-text batch file in the root directory of the boot device.The name of the file is an abbreviation of "automatic execution", which describes its function in automatically executing commands on system startup; the filename was coined in response to the 8.3 filename limitations of the FAT file system family.