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The actual key depends on specific hardware. The settings key is most often Delete (Acer, ASRock, Asus PC, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac) and F2 (Asus motherboard, Dell, Lenovo laptop, Origin PC, Samsung, Toshiba), but it can also be F1 (Lenovo desktop) and F10 . [50] Features present in the BIOS setup utility typically include:
Unlike the legacy PC BIOS, UEFI does not rely on boot sectors, defining instead a boot manager as part of the UEFI specification. When a computer is powered on, the boot manager checks the boot configuration and, based on its settings, then executes the specified OS boot loader or operating system kernel (usually boot loader [62]).
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.
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]
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.
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.
ROM BIOS firmware on a Baby AT motherboard. In some respects, the various firmware components are as important as the operating system in a working computer. However, unlike most modern operating systems, firmware rarely has a well-evolved automatic mechanism of updating itself to fix any functionality issues detected after shipping the unit.
SMM is a special-purpose operating mode provided for handling system-wide functions like power management, system hardware control, or proprietary OEM designed code. It is intended for use only by system firmware (BIOS or UEFI), not by applications software or general-purpose systems software. The main benefit of SMM is that it offers a ...