Most of us know what a BIOS looks like, and have a some bits and pieces of an idea about what its supposed to be doing. This needs to rememdied, so, read the rest of this article!
What happens when you hit the power button on a computer?
It doesn't actually go directly to the CPU, first, the BIOS code is loaded, because that's what's able to hoist up the CPU, hard drive, display, etc.
The BIOS is contained on an external chip (that's why some of you see your motherboard's manufacturer's name when you see the BIOS).
A BIOS not only lets you set the boot order (which was was most of us have used it for), it has a couple of jobs.
First of all, it configures your hardware.
Some hardware is dependent on others, has specific settings, etc.
All of this is handled by the BIOS, so that is ready for the bootloader.
Also, all (well, nearly all) computers have a system clock, which doesn't actually tell you the "time" (again, it could), it counts ticks from a certain date, such as the epoch. The BIOS sets this up.
It also selects what devices it can use as bootable, because there are certain types of storage devices that a BIOS cannot load of off (for example, random storage, volatile memory), and it identifies which are bootable.
Then, comes the main job of the BIOS. It calls a bit of code that resides on the selected storage devices on the first 512 bytes of the first sector.
In the early days of computers, 512 bytes was enough code to load the operating system, and things worked wonderfully.
Of course, this is no longer the case considering that the Linux kernel is almost 15 million lines of code.
So, these 512 bytes (known as the MBR) usually call *another* piece of code which then loads your operating system. Or, it could hold a list of sectors on your hard drive from which another piece of is then called.
What happens when you hit the power button on a computer?
It doesn't actually go directly to the CPU, first, the BIOS code is loaded, because that's what's able to hoist up the CPU, hard drive, display, etc.
The BIOS is contained on an external chip (that's why some of you see your motherboard's manufacturer's name when you see the BIOS).
A BIOS not only lets you set the boot order (which was was most of us have used it for), it has a couple of jobs.
First of all, it configures your hardware.
Some hardware is dependent on others, has specific settings, etc.
All of this is handled by the BIOS, so that is ready for the bootloader.
Also, all (well, nearly all) computers have a system clock, which doesn't actually tell you the "time" (again, it could), it counts ticks from a certain date, such as the epoch. The BIOS sets this up.
It also selects what devices it can use as bootable, because there are certain types of storage devices that a BIOS cannot load of off (for example, random storage, volatile memory), and it identifies which are bootable.
Then, comes the main job of the BIOS. It calls a bit of code that resides on the selected storage devices on the first 512 bytes of the first sector.
In the early days of computers, 512 bytes was enough code to load the operating system, and things worked wonderfully.
Of course, this is no longer the case considering that the Linux kernel is almost 15 million lines of code.
So, these 512 bytes (known as the MBR) usually call *another* piece of code which then loads your operating system. Or, it could hold a list of sectors on your hard drive from which another piece of is then called.
The BIOS also provides a small API for the MBR to use to write to the screen, make some interrupts, etc.
Its pretty cool stuff...
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