OEM's and CMOS Settings?

jolly good asks: "Back in the good old days all CMOS were accessed exactly the same way because there was an agreed upon standard in place. These days, however, motherboard feature sets have expanded to the point where the old 128 byte CMOS standard is no longer adequate. This has lead to different proprietary methods to access the upper 128 bytes in CMOS as there isn't a standard for a 256 byte CMOS. What I'd like to know is how are OEM's handling duplicating CMOS settings across large numbers of machines on production lines?"

They don't....

[Anonymous Coward]

it mostly has to do with slave labour and whole lot of leprechauns.

What a totally obscure question

[LSD-OBS]

In the old days with 128-byte CMOS's, there were settings and bytes that weren't standard across different makes and models of motherboards anyway. I don't see what this has to do with recent boards requiring more CMOS settings/memory whatever.

And most people just use the default CMOS settings anyway, apart from maybe configuring the hard drives.

I really don't get this question.

Re:What a totally obscure question

[Dr. Tom]

Yeah. Remember when CMOS meant "complimentary metal oxide semiconductor," and not "the static RAM on your motherboard used to hold config options"?

Re:What a totally obscure question

[LSD-OBS]

Indeed :^)

A better question

[Gothmolly]

Who cares?

The real question.

[cybermace5]

The real question is, why do you care?

In fact, why would anyone care? No one cares how OEM's do stuff. For all I know, they can have the settings preprogrammed from the factory.

Did you really want to know how you can roll out BIOS settings to a large amount of computers? Or are you trying to write a "CMOS Duplicator" program and want some free market analysis and tech tips?

Either way, I am devoid of all caring whatsoever.

Some people have to do a lot of HW work

[krinsh]

and are not uberadmins or crack coders like the rest of you. So though the question is a little confusing; it is still valid.

My suggestion would be to locate the specific chip vendors and ask yourself; or go the the sites for Phoenix BIOS and the like. If you need to roll out hardware-specific settings for your ports and so forth; like some folks who attach radiation monitors and other devices to dedicated portables may do; and you don't have the necessary experience or can't just flash the BIOS with a specific settings disk or image you've created or had passed to you; the people that provide the original stuff should be able to help you out. I haven't done any BIOS/CMOS configuration or troubleshooting [and yes, sometimes you have to and sometimes you have specified CMOS stuff for dedicated devices like those radiation or radon gas monitors] for a few years so your best bet will be to look for a contact address for your particular vendor. They may just be burning them on some kind of multi-chip rack and plugging them onto the boards; I'm sure it is a manufacturing process for mass configuration rather than some kind of tool but then again I have never been in that industry so I could be talking out of my left nostril right now.

But!!

[krinsh]

At least I tried to answer your question instead of insulting you. I asked an EE guy I know and he said that generally OEMs flash the chips in a factory on mass-burn equipment, test a sample of them and then pass them on to the next stage in the motherboard manufacturing process. He thinks. Testing is done at each phase but the real testing is done before and after the computer is assembled altogether; but only baseline stuff - when you make thousands a day that's what they have warranties for. So there, maybe that will be more helpful and hopefully I got a right answer from him.

Here's what I don't get...

[decep]

People around here have been complaining of a lack of good "Ask Slashdot" questions, and then they complain when they don't understand the question. I think people just want to complain about nothing.

Re:Here's what I don't get...

[walt-sjc]

Actually, people mostly complain about questions that can be answered by typing the fucking question into google.

There are some Ask /. questions that COULD be good except the question is so vague lacking any detail whatsoever that there is no way the poster will get any meaningful answer. Kinda like this one. What's that old saying? Garbage in, Garbage out.

OEM != 1st tier

[itwerx]

A 1st Tier manufacturer (e.g. HP, Compaq et al or anybody who uses proprietary mbd's) will also have a proprietary BIOS (with their name/logo if nothing else). When the BIOS is tweaked for their custom board the default settings are chosen at design time.
Any other manufacturer just uses the BIOS which ships with the board which is itself, you guessed it, setup at design time.
So it's a moot point. BIOS/CMOS settings are different for every model of board. There's nothing for OEM's to worry about on the production line...
Worst case is somebody screws up at the BIOS manufacturer and sets something wrong in which case the guys who write the install scripts have to do a little research and throw a few extra lines of code in to update the BIOS.

My guess

[MrResistor]

I don't work for the kind of OEM you're talking about, and I generally don't work specifically with BIOS, but I do deal with PROMs every day.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, if you didn't know it already, but PROM stands for Programble Read Only Memory, which is often erasable and/or reprogramable in any of a number of ways, designated as EPROMs, EEPROMS, etc. These PROMs are often manufactured using CMOS technology, hence the reason the PROM your BIOS resides on is refered to as CMOS.

Anyway, the default settings are determined at design time, and there are far more settings than any motherboard vendor will ever let you look at. (Most of those you wouldn't want to change anyway, as doing so could completely hose your system.) The design team produces an image, which is then put on the PROM with a PROM Burner, which is basically a chip socket hooked up to a computer running software that enables it to access the features of the PROM. Burning a PROM generally takes less than a minute, and I've used Gang Burners that could do up to 4 at a time. Most likely an OEM would have one larger than that.

The PROM comes off the Burner with the default settings already set, and the assembler (man or machine) just puts it in the socket on the motherboard. It's entirely possible that no one ever turns on the machine until you get it. (The hard drives are likely loaded using cloners, basically a Gang Burner for HDDs)

Dell only owns any given desktop PC for an hour (a little less, actually). The parts are the property of the supplier until they hit the loading dock, and the computer becomes the property of the customer as soon as it hits the shipping dock. Certainly, there is no time for manual BIOS settings or installing stuff to the hard drive. At best, they power it up once just to make sure it works., though they probably don't even do that.

I hope that answers your question and then some.

Here's how it used to be done

[oldstrat]

/.
You were talking about the settings in the BIOS, not addressing the upper 256 bytes.

A special card that plugged into a slot on the motherboard that set all the settings and did basic dignostics after assembly.

I would assume these days that with all the autodetect stuff combined with predefined defaults from the main board maker, that it might just do diagnostics.

Grab some datasheets

[tzanger]

The answer lies in the datasheets. Many RTC chips have more than 128 bytes of NVRAM, and use a bank swapping technique to select the alternate banks. Dallas Semiconductor [dalsemi.com] is one such source, although most new systems have the RTC embedded in one of the main ICs of the chipset or on the super IO chip. Here [smsc.com] is one example, the SMC FDC37N958FR, which is used in the Dauphin Orasis v1, an SBC I am experimenting with putting LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] on to get around certain limitations. Page 215 is the start of the RTC/NVRAM access. This particular device has 256 bytes of NVRAM, several of which are reserved for the RTC and 8051 scratchpad. Since there is only 256 bytes, there is no bank switching. The DS1251 [maxim-ic.com] is an RTC/NVRAM chip with 512KB of static RAM. The little bitch is expensive, too. :-) It uses a banking method where one of the normally user-available registers is now a bank selection register.

I seriously doubt many systems have more than 256 bytes of NVRAM. That is a LOT of space for settings.