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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.
Nonvolatile BIOS memory refers to a small memory on PC motherboards that is used to store BIOS settings. It is traditionally called CMOS RAM because it uses a volatile, low-power complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) SRAM (such as the Motorola MC146818 [1] or similar) powered by a small battery when system and standby power is off. [2]
Synchronous communication device, adapter, or port 1700–1799: Hard drive or adapter (or both) 1800–1899: Expansion unit (XT) 2000–2199: Bisynchronous communication adapter 2400–2599: EGA system-board video (MCA) 3000–3199: LAN adapter 4800–4999: Internal modem 7000–7099: Phoenix BIOS chips 7300–7399: 3.5-inch disk drive 8900 ...
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 ...
Network booting, shortened netboot, is the process of booting a computer from a network rather than a local drive. This method of booting can be used by routers , diskless workstations and centrally managed computers ( thin clients ) such as public computers at libraries and schools.
The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel–HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. BIOS limitations (such as 16-bit real mode, 1 MB addressable memory space, [7] assembly language programming, and PC AT hardware) had become too restrictive for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting. [8]
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For DOS remote boot to work, the RPL boot loader is loaded into the client's memory over the network before the operating system starts. Without special precautions the operating system could easily overwrite the RPL code during boot, since the RPL code resides in unallocated memory (typically at the top of the available conventional memory).