Configuring Hardware
Christine Bresnahan, Richard Blum · 2019
This chapter examines how your Linux system interacts with the hardware it's running on and how to make changes to that setup if necessary. All IBM-compatible workstations and servers utilize some type of built-in firmware to control how the installed operating system starts. On older workstations and servers, this firmware was called the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). On newer workstations and servers, a new method, called the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), is responsible for maintaining the system hardware status and launching an installed operating system. Both methods eventually launch the main operating system program, but each method uses different ways of doing that. The BIOS firmware found in older workstations and servers was somewhat limited. It had a simple menu interface that allowed you to change some settings to control how the system found hardware and define what device the BIOS should use to start the operating system.