Question: After the BIOS hands the system over to Windows

[irrigating]

After the BIOS hands the system over to Windows, does it have any function during normal computing, or does it sit dormant until the next boot?

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: irrigating
After the BIOS hands the system over to Windows, does it have any funtion during normal computing, or does it sit dormant until the next boot?

It's still the interface between the OS and the hardware.

 

[irrigating]

Thanks.

 

[tcsenter]

After the BIOS hands the system over to Windows, does it have any function during normal computing, or does it sit dormant until the next boot

Very little, some ACPI power management functions, little more. The OS and drivers manage hardware directly to a substantial degree. When legacy free PC's are fully implemented in a few years, you'll see no BIOS function after the OS is transferred.

 

[Peter]

bzzzt. Not true.

BIOS is hard at work at runtime. Firstly, it provides the mainboard design specific functionality that the operating system technically cannot have a clue about - power management, hardware monitoring, event handling. Then, it assists the operating system in hardware related tasks like hot plugging peripherals, docking station management et al. Particularly with legacy free, fully ACPI enabled PCs, the BIOS does quite a lot of things.

 

[tcsenter]

BIOS is hard at work at runtime. Firstly, it provides the mainboard design specific functionality that the operating system technically cannot have a clue about - power management, hardware monitoring, event handling. Then, it assists the operating system in hardware related tasks like hot plugging peripherals, docking station management et al. Particularly with legacy free, fully ACPI enabled PCs, the BIOS does quite a lot of things

You and I are only differing in our estimation of "quite a lot of things" and "very little", as Windows 2000/XP OS, applications, and drivers can and do interface directly with hardware to a degree found in no Win9x OS. As overly broad and non-specific as it may have been, when I stated "power management", what I was referring to is ACPI (and its associated event handling).

Although, I admit that I didn't even consider the BIOS' role in hardware events such as hot-swapping peripherals. My train of thought was a static hardware configuration.

I do not mean to suggest that a 100% legacy free PC will be 'free' of firmware. We will always have firmware, at least for a very long time.

 

[Iron Woode]

I thought win2000 and WinXP did not directly access the hardware. Instead, they use HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to access the hardware. Hence why drivers for NT based OS's are different from dos based OS's which actually do directly access the hardware, ie: video card.

I could be wrong.