Answered: Device drivers are unnecessary since…

Database System Concepts

7th Edition

ISBN:9780078022159

Author:Abraham Silberschatz Professor, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan

Publisher:Abraham Silberschatz Professor, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan

Chapter1: Introduction

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 1PE

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Device drivers are unnecessary since the BIOS already contains code that communicates with the computer's hardware.

Expert Solution

Step 1

The issues of traditional x86 BIOS :

The BIOS only contains code to make contact with a restricted subset of devices needed to start up the system.
- For Universal Serial Bus (USB) printer or Webcam, BIOS does not hold a driver.
- Thousands of devices are used there, that devices require drivers.
- A BIOS is not able to hold them all. It denotes that each and every recently discovered hardware device would need a BIOS update.
The BIOS INT calls are not fast and inappropriate for recent hardware.
- They are organizing to read/write compact block of data.
- They do not hold a technique to read few megabytes from a disk using Direct Memory Access (DMA) into a buffer.
- The original BIOS INT calls were implemented for floppy drives and text mode displays.
The BIOS INT layer works in actual mode, but any recent Operating System (OS) works in protected mode.
- To perform a BIOS call in a recent OS, one needs to drop to actual mode, and perform the work, and then get back to protected mode.

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