Question about device drivers.

[Adam S]

Hi everybody! This is my first post here.

I'm confused about the relationship between device drivers and the BIOS. My understanding is that a device driver is a piece of software that functions as a "translator" between the operating system and a device. But doesn't a BIOS also need device drivers to "talk" to the screen, keyboard, memory, etc. ? If the BIOS does need device drivers, does it need drivers for all devices or just some? And are these the same drivers used by the OS or different?

 

[artoulis]

Hi everybody! This is my first post here.

I'm confused about the relationship between device drivers and the BIOS. My understanding is that a device driver is a piece of software that functions as a "translator" between the operating system and a device. But doesn't a BIOS also need device drivers to "talk" to the screen, keyboard, memory, etc. ? If the BIOS does need device drivers, does it need drivers for all devices or just some? And are these the same drivers used by the OS or different?

BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System

a BIOS has all "drivers" that are nessesary for the system to boot up
this includes keyboard, vga, clock,cpu,ram, hdd and other
after bootup begins(this is normally called bootstraping) it's up to the operating system to load any additional device drivers.

so BIOS utilizes ONLY the basic devices for the computer to bootup.
after that everything is up to the OS