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BIOS interrupt calls are a facility that operating systems and application programs use to invoke the facilities of the Basic Input/Output System on IBM PC compatible computers. Traditionally, BIOS calls are mainly used by MS-DOS programs and some other software such as boot loaders (including, mostly historically, relatively simple application software that boots directly and runs without an operating system—especially game software.) BIOS only runs in the real address mode (Real Mode) of the x86 CPU, so programs that call BIOS either must also run in real mode or must switch from protected mode to real mode before calling BIOS and then switch back again. For this reason, modern operating systems that use the CPU in Protected Mode generally do not use the BIOS to support system functions, although some of them use the BIOS to probe and initialize hardware resources during their early stages of booting. In all computers, software instructions control the physical hardware (screen, disk, keyboard, etc.) from the moment the power is switched on. In a PC, the BIOS, preloaded in ROM on the mainboard, takes control immediately after the processor is reset, including during power-up or when a hardware reset button is pressed. The BIOS initializes the hardware, finds, loads and runs the boot program (usually, but not necessarily, an OS loader), and provides basic hardware control to the operating system running on the machine, which is usually an operating system but may be a directly booting single software application. For IBM's part, they provided all the information needed to use their BIOS fully or to directly utilize the hardware and avoid BIOS completely, when programming the early IBM PC models (prior to the PS/2). From the beginning, programmers had the choice of using BIOS or not, on a per-hardware-peripheral basis. Today, the BIOS in a new PC still supports most, if not all, of the BIOS interrupt function calls defined by IBM for the IBM AT (introduced in 1984), along with many more newer ones, plus extensions to some of the originals (e.g. expanded parameter ranges). This, combined with a similar degree of hardware compatibility, means that most programs written for an IBM AT can still run correctly on a new PC today, assuming that the faster speed of execution is acceptable (which it typically is for all but games that use CPU-based timing). Despite the considerable limitations of the services accessed through the BIOS interrupts, they have proven extremely useful and durable to technological change. == Purpose of BIOS calls == BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction—the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden from the program. So, for example, a program that wants to read from a hard disk does not need to know whether the hard disk is an ATA, SCSI, or SATA drive (or in earlier days, an ESDI drive, or an MFM or RLL drive with perhaps a Seagate ST-506 controller, perhaps one of the several Western Digital controller types, or with a different proprietary controller of another brand). The program only needs to identify the number of the drive it wishes to access and the address of the sector it needs to read or write, and the BIOS will take care of translating this general request into the specific sequence of elementary operations required to complete the task through the particular disk controller hardware that is connected to that drive. The program is freed from needing to know how to control at a low level every type of hard disk (or display adapter, or port interface, or real-time clock peripheral) that it may need to access. This both makes programming operating systems and applications easier and makes the programs smaller, reducing the duplication of program code, as the functionality that is included in the BIOS does not need to be included in every program that needs it; relatively short calls to the BIOS are included there instead. (In operating systems where the BIOS is not used, service calls provided by the operating system itself generally fulfill the same function and purpose.) The BIOS also frees computer hardware designers (to the extent that programs are written to use the BIOS exclusively) from being constrained to maintain exact hardware compatibility with old systems when designing new systems, in order to maintain compatibility with existing software. For example, the keyboard hardware on the IBM PCjr works very differently than the keyboard hardware on earlier IBM PC models, but to programs that use the keyboard only through the BIOS, this difference is nearly invisible. (As a good example of the other side of this issue, a significant share of the PC programs in use at the time the PCjr was introduced did not use the keyboard through BIOS exclusively, so IBM also included hardware features in the PCjr to emulate the way the original IBM PC and IBM PC XT keyboard hardware works. The hardware emulation is not exact, so not all programs that try to use the keyboard hardware directly will work correctly on the PCjr, but all programs that use only the BIOS keyboard services will.) In addition to giving access to hardware facilities, BIOS provides added facilities that are implemented in the BIOS software. For example, the BIOS maintains separate cursor positions for up to eight text display pages and provides for TTY-like output with automatic line wrap and interpretation of basic control characters such as carriage return and line feed, whereas the CGA-compatible text display hardware has only one global cursor and cannot automatically advance the cursor or interpret control characters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「BIOS interrupt call」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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