BIOS - Firmware On Adapter Cards

Firmware On Adapter Cards

A computer system can contain several BIOS firmware chips. The motherboard BIOS typically contains code to access hardware components absolutely necessary for bootstrapping the system, such as the keyboard (either PS/2 or on a USB human interface device), and storage (floppy drives, if available, and PATA or SATA hard disk controllers). In addition, plug-in adapter cards such as SCSI, RAID, network interface cards, and video boards often include their own BIOS (e.g. Video BIOS), complementing or replacing the system BIOS code for the given component. (This code is generally referred to as an option ROM). Even devices built into the motherboard can behave in this way; their option ROMs can be stored as separate code on the main BIOS flash chip, and upgraded either in tandem with, or separately from, the main BIOS.

An add-in card usually only requires an option ROM if it:

• Needs to be used before the operating system can be loaded (usually this means it is required in the bootstrapping process), and
• Is too sophisticated or specific a device to be handled by the main BIOS

Older PC operating systems, such as MS-DOS (including all DOS-based versions of Microsoft Windows), and early-stage bootloaders, may continue to use the BIOS for input and output. However, the restrictions of the BIOS environment means that modern OSes will almost always use their own device drivers to directly control the hardware. Generally, these device drivers only use BIOS and option ROM calls for very specific (non-performance-critical) tasks, such as preliminary device initialization.

In order to discover memory-mapped ISA option ROMs during the boot process, PC BIOS implementations scan real memory from 0xC0000 to 0xF0000 on 2 KiB boundaries, looking for a ROM signature: 0xAA55 (0x55 followed by 0xAA, since the x86 architecture is little-endian). In a valid expansion ROM, this signature is immediately followed by a single byte indicating the number of 512-byte blocks it occupies in real memory. The next byte contains an offset describing the option ROM's entry point, to which the BIOS immediately transfers control. At this point, the expansion ROM code takes over, using BIOS services to register interrupt vectors for use by post-boot applications, provide a user configuration interface, or display diagnostic information.

There are many methods and utilities for examining the contents of various motherboard BIOS and expansion ROMs, such as Microsoft DEBUG or the Unix dd.