Page 1 of 1
Some question about BIOS and the manufacturers
Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:22 am
by dickzfreak
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?
Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 11:08 am
by cp
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?
Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:04 pm
by Rehbar
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.
Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 8:04 pm
by cp
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.
