In computing, BIOS is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the booting process. The firmware comes pre-installed on the computer's motherboard.
In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used.
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once, as opposed to serial communication, in which bits are sent one at a time. To do this, parallel ports require multiple data lines in their cables and port connectors and tend to be larger than contemporary serial ports, which only require one data line.
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit industry standards organization that creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. Member companies and alliance partners collaborate on standards to improve interoperable management of information technologies.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is a specification for the firmware architecture of a computing platform. When a computer is powered on, the UEFI-implementation is typically the first that runs, before starting the operating system. Examples include AMI Aptio, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, InsydeH2O.
The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 uses a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart is the SGI Octane. The O2 was SGI's last attempt at a low-end workstation.
American Megatrends International, LLC, doing business as AMI, is an international hardware and software company, specializing in PC hardware and firmware. The company was founded in 1985 by Pat Sarma and Subramonian Shankar. It is headquartered in Building 800 at 3095 Satellite Boulevard in unincorporated Gwinnett County, Georgia, United States, near the city of Duluth, and in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
In computing, the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures that can be used to read management information produced by the BIOS of a computer. This eliminates the need for the operating system to probe hardware directly to discover what devices are present in the computer. The SMBIOS specification is produced by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), a non-profit standards development organization. The DMTF estimates that two billion client and server systems implement SMBIOS.
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, auto configuration, 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, the computer hardware components, and the operating systems.
The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) generates a standard framework for managing and tracking components in a desktop, notebook or server computer, by abstracting these components from the software that manages them. The development of DMI, 2.0 version June 24, 1998, marked the first move by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) into desktop-management standards. Before the introduction of DMI, no standardized source of information could provide details about components in a personal computer.
In computing, serial presence detect (SPD) is a standardized way to automatically access information about a memory module. Earlier 72-pin SIMMs included five pins that provided five bits of parallel presence detect (PPD) data, but the 168-pin DIMM standard changed to a serial presence detect to encode more information.
The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of partition tables of a physical computer storage device, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, using universally unique identifiers (UUIDs), which are also known as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Forming a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard, it is nevertheless also used for some BIOSs, because of the limitations of master boot record (MBR) partition tables, which use 32 bits for logical block addressing (LBA) of traditional 512-byte disk sectors.
Dreambox is a series of Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television receivers, produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia.
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is an international standard for a secure cryptoprocessor, a dedicated microcontroller designed to secure hardware through integrated cryptographic keys. The term can also refer to a chip conforming to the standard ISO/IEC 11889. Common uses are to verify platform integrity, and to store disk encryption keys.
The Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), formerly known as Linux-8086, is a Linux-like operating system kernel. It is a subset of the Linux kernel, intended for 16-bit computers with limited processor and memory resources such as machines powered by Intel 8086 and compatible microprocessors not supported by 32-bit Linux.
The AMD 690 chipset series is an integrated graphics chipset family which was developed and manufactured by AMD subsidiary ATI for both AMD and Intel platforms focusing on both desktop and mobile computing markets. The corresponding chipset for the Intel platform has a marketing name of Radeon Xpress 1200 series.
Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
The Intel Management Engine (ME), also known as the Intel Manageability Engine, is an autonomous subsystem that has been incorporated in virtually all of Intel's processor chipsets since 2008. It is located in the Platform Controller Hub of modern Intel motherboards.
fwupd is an open-source daemon for managing the installation of firmware updates on Linux-based systems, developed by GNOME maintainer Richard Hughes. It is designed primarily for servicing the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware on supported devices via EFI System Resource Table (ESRT) and UEFI Capsule, which is supported in Linux kernel 4.2 and later. Previously, the initiation of UEFI firmware updates within an operating system could, on most systems, only be performed using Microsoft Windows or DOS-specific software. ESRT allows the firmware to expose updatable components to the operating system, which can pass a UEFI capsule with updated firmware for processing and installation on the next boot. Updates can be exposed via a command line tool, or within graphical package managers via a D-Bus interface.
