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ACPI
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto configuration (e.g. Plug and Play and hot swapping), and status monitoring. It was first released in December 1996. ACPI aims to replace Advanced Power Management (APM), the MultiProcessor Specification, and the Plug and Play BIOS (PnP) Specification. ACPI brings power management under the control of the operating system, as opposed to the previous BIOS-centric system that relied on platform-specific firmware to determine power management and configuration policies. The specification is central to the Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management (OSPM) system. ACPI defines hardware abstraction interfaces between the device's firmware (e.g. BIOS, UEFI), the computer hardware components, and the operating systems. Internally, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BIOS
In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup). The firmware comes pre-installed on the computer's motherboard. The name originates from the Basic Input/Output System used in the CP/M operating system in 1975. The BIOS firmware was originally proprietary to the IBM PC; it was reverse engineered by some companies (such as Phoenix Technologies) looking to create compatible systems. The interface of that original system serves as a ''de facto'' standard. The BIOS in older PCs initializes and tests the system hardware components ( power-on self-test or POST for short), and loads a boot loader from a mass storage device which then initializes a kernel. In the era of DOS, the BIOS provided BIOS interrupt calls for the keyboard, display, st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UEFI
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, as an acronym) is a Specification (technical standard), specification for the firmware Software architecture, architecture of a computing platform. When a computer booting, is powered on, the UEFI implementation is typically the first that runs, before starting the operating system. Examples include AMI Aptio, Phoenix Technologies, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, and InsydeH2O. UEFI replaces the BIOS that was present in the boot ROM of all personal computers that are IBM PC compatible, although it can provide Backward compatibility, backwards compatibility with the BIOS using #CSM booting, CSM booting. Unlike its predecessor, BIOS, which is a de facto standard originally created by IBM as proprietary software, UEFI is an open standard maintained by an industry consortium. Like BIOS, most UEFI implementations are proprietary. Intel developed the original ''Extensible Firmware Interface'' (''EFI'') specification. The last Inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UEFI Forum
UEFI Forum, Inc. is an Business alliance, alliance between technology companies to coordinate the development of the UEFI specifications. The board of directors includes representatives from twelve ''promoter'' companies: Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, American Megatrends, Arm Holdings, ARM, Apple Computer, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies. Overview The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI versions were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS. In addition to the UEFI specification, the forum is responsible for a UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specification, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unified EFI Forum
UEFI Forum, Inc. is an alliance between technology companies to coordinate the development of the UEFI specifications. The board of directors includes representatives from twelve ''promoter'' companies: AMD, American Megatrends, ARM, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies. Overview The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI versions were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS. In addition to the UEFI specification, the forum is responsible for a UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specification, which addresses the firmware internal architecture as well as firmware ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plug And Play BIOS
The term Legacy Plug and Play, also shortened to Legacy PnP, describes a series of specifications and Microsoft Windows features geared towards operating system configuration of devices, and some device IDs are assigned by Unified EFI Forum, UEFI Forum. The standards were primarily aimed at the IBM PC standard bus, later dubbed Industry Standard Architecture, Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). Related specifications are also defined for the common external or specialist buses commonly attached via ISA at the time of development, including RS-232 and parallel port devices. As a Windows feature, Plug and Play refers to operating system functionality that supports connectivity, configuration and management with native plug and play devices. Originally considered part of the same feature set as the specifications, Plug and Play in this context refers primarily to the responsibilities and interfaces associated with Windows driver development. Plug and Play allows for detection of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Management
Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power state when inactive. In computing this is known as PC power management and is built around a standard called ACPI which superseded APM. All recent computers have ACPI support. Motivations PC power management for computer systems is desired for many reasons, particularly: * Reduce overall energy consumption * Prolong battery life for portable and embedded systems * Reduce cooling requirements * Reduce noise * Reduce operating costs for energy and cooling Lower power consumption also means lower heat dissipation, which increases system stability, and less energy use, which saves money and reduces the impact on the environment. Processor level techniques The power management for microprocessors can be done over the whole processor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MultiProcessor Specification
The MultiProcessor Specification (MPS) for the x86 architecture is an open standard describing enhancements to both operating systems and firmware, which will allow them to work with x86-compatible processors in a multi-processor configuration. MPS covers Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) architectures. Version 1.1 of the specification was released on April 11, 1994. Version 1.4 of the specification was released on July 1, 1995, which added extended configuration tables to improve support for multiple PCI bus configurations and improve expandability. The Linux kernel and FreeBSD are known to support the Intel MPS. Windows NT are known to support MPS 1.1 and, through later Service Packs, also MPS 1.4. Windows 2000 or higher are known to support MPS 1.4. OS/2 are known to support MPS 1.1 only. Mac OS X are known to support MPS 1.4 only. There is a utility called 'mptable' which can be used to examine the MPS table on motherboards. Since most newer machines support ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Management
Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power state when inactive. In computing this is known as PC power management and is built around a standard called ACPI which superseded APM. All recent computers have ACPI support. Motivations PC power management for computer systems is desired for many reasons, particularly: * Reduce overall energy consumption * Prolong battery life for portable and embedded systems * Reduce cooling requirements * Reduce noise * Reduce operating costs for energy and cooling Lower power consumption also means lower heat dissipation, which increases system stability, and less energy use, which saves money and reduces the impact on the environment. Processor level techniques The power management for microprocessors can be done over the whole processor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Power Management
Advanced power management (APM) is a technical standard for power management developed by Intel and Microsoft and released in 1992 which enables an operating system running an IBM-compatible personal computer to work with the BIOS (part of the computer's firmware) to achieve power management. Revision 1.2 was the last version of the APM specification, released in 1996. ACPI is the successor to APM. Microsoft dropped support for APM in Windows Vista. The Linux kernel still mostly supports APM, though support for APM CPU idle was dropped in version 3.0. Overview APM uses a layered approach to manage devices. APM-aware applications (which include device drivers) talk to an OS-specific APM driver. This driver communicates to the APM-aware BIOS, which controls the hardware. There is the ability to opt out of APM control on a device-by-device basis, which can be used if a driver wants to communicate directly with a hardware device. Communication occurs both ways; power management eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plug And Play
In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resource conflicts. The term "plug and play" has since been expanded to a wide variety of applications to which the same lack of user setup applies. Expansion devices are controlled and exchange data with the host system through defined memory or I/O space port addresses, direct memory access channels, interrupt request lines and other mechanisms, which must be uniquely associated with a particular device to operate. Some computers provided unique combinations of these resources to each slot of a motherboard or backplane. Other designs provided all resources to all slots, and each peripheral device had its own address decoding for the registers or memory blocks it needed to communicate with the host system. Since fixed assignments made expans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hardware Abstraction
Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be accessed through identical interfaces even though ''C'' may contain different subclasses of devices that each provide a different hardware interface. Hardware abstractions often allow programmers to write device-independent, high performance applications by providing standard operating system (OS) calls to hardware. The process of abstracting pieces of hardware is often done from the perspective of a CPU. Each type of CPU has a specific instruction set architecture or ISA. The ISA represents the primitive operations of the machine that are available for use by assembly programmers and compiler writers. One of the main functions of a compiler is to allow a programmer to write an algorithm in a high-level language without having to care ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Firmware
In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ..., firmware is software that provides low-level control of computing device Computer hardware, hardware. For a relatively simple device, firmware may perform all control, monitoring and data manipulation functionality. For a more complex device, firmware may provide relatively low-level control as well as hardware abstraction Service (systems architecture), services to higher-level software such as an operating system. Firmware is found in a wide range of computing devices including personal computers, smartphones, home appliances, vehicles, computer peripherals and in many of the integrated circuits inside each of these larger systems. Firmware is stored in non-volatile memory either read-only memory (ROM) or progra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
