From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Sep 29 16:17:43 1999
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Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 00:24:15 +0100
From: Alex <alex@frustum.clara.co.uk>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: FreeBSD needs BIOS ?
Message-ID: <19990930002415.A314@frustum.clara.co.uk>
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- Isn't BIOS only there to boot FreeBSD, and after that FreeBSD takes
care of the resources?

- Does it need to have any information passed from BIOS apart from HD
size?

On Intel motherboard with Pheonix's BIOS on every start up I am
greeted with "Motherboard by Intel" picture. To kill the picture and
ignore BIOS's memory test and start the boot process I press "Esq"
key, the picture gets killed and I boot into FreeBSD.

"Nothing strange there", you might think,"FreeBSD doesn't depend on
the BIOS, so the memory test is not very useful to it".

But on the boot before the last when I killed the BIOS's picture,
memory test only registered 9M of memory. When the FreeBSD started, it
only started with 9M of memory.

FreeBSD usually maps my memory as 

/kernel: real memory = 67108864 (65536K bytes)
/kernel: avail memory = 62775296 (6134K bytes)
				 
But on that occasion it mapped it as

/kernel: real memory = 9568256 (9344K bytes)
/kernel: avail memory = 7258112 (7088K bytes)

My memory is 64M, and in the BIOS setup I have set the OS to non
PNP. Motherboard is Intel SE440BX-2. BIOS is Phoenix 4, release 6.


Thank you for your replies.

-Alex

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