Describing the BIOS
- The BIOS is a program stored in a chip on the motherboard
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The BIOS is used for:
- Booting up the operating system
- Initializing hardware and device drivers
- Loading the kernel into memory
- The kernel is program started by the BIOS
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It is used for:
- Translating software commands to the CPU
- Interacting with the device drivers
Motivating Device Drivers
- A device driver is a computer program
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It is used for:
- Monitoring devices attached to a computer
- Informing the system of any operations performed
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These operations include the following:
- Mouse I/O
- Keyboard I/O
- RAM
- etc.
- Essentially, a device driver is a software interface for hardware devices
- This enables other programs to access hardware functions
- Specifically, drivers abstract precise details about the actual hardware
- As a result, these programs don't need to interact with these details
References
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