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Subject: Re: not so strange I guess
Name:
 ludicrous
Date: 1/27/2002 6:14:11 PM (GMT-7)
IP Address: 138.67.74.229
In Reply to: not so strange I guess posted by
booly
Message:
The BIOS has little to do with it, all the BIOS does is provide extremely low-level code that allows the hardware to initialize from scratch (i.e. power-on) and provides some governing rules for how the hardware interacts.
Program execution is governed by both the OS and the program. If the program is written with SMP in mind, then it will actually spawn multiple threads, i.e. execution strings. If the OS is capable of managing two different processors, then it will allocate the threads between the two different processors with some sort of load-balancing scheme.
Generally, the OS interfaces with the hardware and the programs interface with the OS. There are some exceptions (DirectX games, for example, where the OS voluntarily rescinds cetain levels of direct hardware access to the program in order to improve program performance, at the possible expense of stability).
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