Some question about BIOS and the manufacturers

Only for programmers and BIOS gurus with technical questions.
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dickzfreak
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Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:47 am

1) Why are BIOSes still needed to be packaged within the motherboard?

2) Why can't BIOS/Motherboard manufacturers collate all necessary devices drivers (of a motherboard) and store it in the ROM instead of device manufacturer individually ditribute tehm?
cp
BIOS Guru
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Joined: Mon Oct 21, 2002 9:07 pm
Location: Germany

1) A BIOS provides the basic initialization of the components on the mainboard and all additional plug-in devices. Without the BIOS a system couldn't display anything on the screen, wouldn't recognize any drives and thus wouldn't boot _any_ operating system.

2) The device drivers would be far to large to fit them into the BIOS ROM. Besides there are updates for those drivers frequently for a reason. And third: which drivers should be placed into the ROM (if it would work)? Windows 98 drivers? Windows 2000 drivers? Windows XP drivers? or even Linux or OS/2 drivers? There are a bunch of different operating systems out there (almost) each of it with its own driver for the same piece of silicon. Most device manufacturers are already overstrained releasing a working driver for anything else than the latest Windows...what would happen if they additionally ought to fit it into a tiny ROM?
Rehbar
BIOS Newbie
Posts: 22
Joined: Wed Nov 15, 2006 9:05 am

But they can do this that all device drivers like(VGA, Sound, NIC, SCSI, ) which are onboard name in bios so end user can easy to find exect driver for them. :?
cp
BIOS Guru
Posts: 1914
Joined: Mon Oct 21, 2002 9:07 pm
Location: Germany

That's what the manual is for. There are all those shiny marketing names for the chips, too.
besides: the PCI IDs are a very reliable source of information on any device on the mainboard. No need to put them anywhere else.
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