A METHOD FOR BASIC INPUT-OUTPUT SYSTEM (BIOS) CODE COMPRESSION/DECOMPRESSION DISPATCHER

摘要

A basic input/output system (BIOS) (38) stored in a read only memory (ROM) (10) is organized into a set of components, each being dispatched as an independent executable object after being copied to a shadow memory portion of a random acess memory (RAM) (22). Three types of components are defined, initialization components, runtime components and functional components. The initialization components are dispatched during a Power On Self Test (POST) cycle such that the initialization components are active during initialization. The initialization components are terminated prior to loading an operating system. The runtime components are maintained decompressed and executable after loading of the operating system. The functional components are dispatched on an as needed basis. When dispatching components a decompression dispatcher (52) works from a component packing list (50) provided in the ROM image by a BIOS build process.