Re: Tricks Phoenix taught Microsoft and Intel
From Technology Focus, the Phoenix company magazine article, "OnNow - Defining Power Management in Tomorrow's PC" at phoenix.com.
Arman Toorians, director of new product development at Phoenix and the chief architect of Phoenix's ACPI efforts (power management):
Before Microsoft went public with the ACPI concept, they called Phoenix into a meeting about 6-weeks before releasing the specification. They told us what they were planning. We were involved early with Microsoft in the OnNow specification with regard to APM 1.2....
In December of 1995, when the public specification was announced, there were a few surprises -- like finding out that Microsoft intended for the OS to completely take over power management. Microsoft and Intel were then asking "how does Phoenix plan to support manufacturers with the quality assurance and implementation of ACPI," and "how does Phoenix plan to implement all of these power management and configuration capabilities?" Microsoft's original plan was to remove the BIOS from the power management role completely. Everything would be in an operating system driver.
In meetings and communication between Phoenix and Microsoft engineers, we showed that there is no way to completely eliminate the BIOS and replace it with a driver. There are simply too many restrictions on a driver running the power management, and because drivers load after the operating system, you would have no "pre-boot" initialization or configuration support. Through our discussions with Microsoft and Intel, we worked out the details and came to a point where Microsoft realized that they still need the BIOS -- in a significant way....
The way BIOS works, and the interaction users have with it may be streamlined, but critical functions such as the Power On Self Test (POST), memory check, hardware initialization and device enumeration will still be controlled by the BIOS. Also even though the OS will be carrying out power management policy, the actual instructions to turn a device on or off will still be handled by the BIOS. |
