Configuring Hardware Flashcards
BIOS
Basic Input/Output System; used on older systems
UEFI
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, maintains system hardware status and launching the installed os, adopted in 2005
what was a limitation of BIOS firmware
it can read only one sectors worth of data from a hard drive into memory to run
describe the BIOS boot process
BIOS runs bootloader. The bootloader can be on a number of devices, but if it is on a hard drive, then it looks to the master boot record (MBR) for the bootloader. The bootloader points to the actual location of the OS.
master boot record (MBR)
first sector on the first hard drive partition on the system
chainloading
making the primary boot loader point to a secondary boot loader or program
EFI
Extensible Firmware Interface, created in 1998
how is UEFI different from BIOS
UEFI specifies a special disk partition, called the EFI System Partition, to store boot loader programs. Any size boot loader is allowed. There can also be multiple boot loader programs for multiple OSs.
ESP (UEFI)
utilizes old Microsoft File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem to store boot loader programs
Where is ESP mounted in Linux systems?
/boot/efi
What is the file extension for boot loaded programs
.efi
PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect
What version of PCI is currently used on most server sizes on motherboards?
PCI Express (PCIe)
GPIO Interface
General Purpose Input/Output interface
What interface has become popular with small utility LInux systems, designed for controlling external devices for automation projects?
GPIO
device files
files that the Linux kernel creates in the special /dev directory to interface with hardware devices
What are the two types of device files in Linux?
Character device files and Block device files
Character device files
transfer data one character at a time. Often used for serial devices such as terminals and USB devices
block device files
transfer data in large blocks of data. Often used for high-speed data transfer devices such as hard drives and network cards
What is the name of a virtual directory that the kernel dynamically populates to provide access to information about the system hardware settings and status?
/proc
What does IRQ stand for and what does it do?
Interrupt Requests allow hardware devices to indicate when they have data to send to the CPU. Handled by PNP.
how can you view the current IRQs on your system?
cat /proc/interrupts
What are system I/O ports?
locations in memory where the CPU can send data to and receive data from the hardware device. Handled by PNP.
DMA channels
send data from a hardware device directly to memory on the system without waiting for the CPU
how do you display I/O ports on a system?
sudo cat /proc/ioports
how do you display DMA channels currently in use by the system?
cat /proc/dma
what is the /sys directory?
a virtual directory, created by the kernel in the sysfs filesystem format, and provides additional information about hardware devices that any user on the system can access
how do you view the files in the /sys directory?
sudo ls -al /sys
lsdev
displays information about the hardware devices installed on the Linux system
ldsblk
displays all block devices
kernel modules
individual hardware driver files that can be linked into the kernel at runtime
lsmod
lists all modules installed on your system
modinfo [device]
displays information about a specific module
what two commands can help with installing a new module?
insmod and modprobe
.ko extention
represents a module file
