Page 1 of 1
Preconfigured controllers
Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 5:17 am
by muisei
Brendan wrote:
For backwards compatibility purposes, the ATA/IDE controller is pre-configured by the BIOS to look and behave like a standard ISA ATA/IDE controller.
What other controllers are also preconfigured by the BIOS?
Re: Preconfigured controllers
Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 7:03 am
by Brendan
Hi,
muisei wrote:What other controllers are also preconfigured by the BIOS?
A quick list:
- - PIC
- PIT
- PS/2 keyboard
- Primary IDE/ATA controller
- Secondary IDE/ATA controller
- SCSI controller (if present)
- Floppy disk controller
- First video card
Of course "pre-configured" means "configured for legacy mode/DOS", and shouldn't be confused with "configured for a real OS"....
Also, ISA Plug & Play devices and PCI devices should have resources assigned to them by the BIOS. For example, even though a second video card may not be initialised, the BIOS should have memory mapped it somewhere and given it some I/O ports to use.
There's also other things, like the chipset (RAM, addressing holes, power management) and the CPU/s (MTRRs, some MSRs, SMM).
Cheers,
Brendan