I noticed something weird

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The term "Firmware" simply refers to the basic "Operating System" on a given device, that allows that device to operate. In the case of Motherboards, this is simply responsible for managing the hardware, and for starting the real Operating System. Beyond that, the operating system takes over. You need drivers for any device attached to the Motherboard because, although the Firmware is aware of the device, it doesnt know what to do with it. The driver tells the OS how to communicate with the device to make it to what it was designed for (in the case of the NIC, for network communications).

On routers, the Firmware is more comprehensive. Because the entire device is considered a single unit, and all components of that unit are known at the time of manufacture (unlike a PC where each component is manufactured separately and fit together at a later date), the firmware is built to incorporate all components in the unit, and to deal with the function of the entire device. This includes anything the manufacturer wants the device to do (such as user based settings). You dont need extra drivers, because the manufacturer has built the firmware to incorporate all the functions of all the components of the device.

 

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Fergal my friend, your explanation is just like jumped from an encyclopedia.

As far as i know, Both Boot program inside Read-only memory of the computer and the bootstrap in router/switch(Cisco devices) perform the first step before OS is searched and found by these two then loaded.(there indicates the second and
last step) In order to these devices operate fully-functionally. Once the operating system is launched, it takes
the responsibility of controlling hardware and software. However, hardware are like nothing without drivers
cos operating system has to know about them.


To my understanding, PCs are not networking devices by default, thats why they need drivers for the NIC whereas routers and switches are. Cos they do not need drivers, am i wrong?

On the other hand, as i told above, both PCs and networking devices have firmware.

 

Yes you are

 

Ta ma de!

Just listen to what I told you. The router firmware does not need "drivers" because the manufacturer has written all the instructions necessary to operate the network components into the firmware. There is no such thing as a "networking device by default". There is simply a collection of electronic components with a software element making use to those components. They all need code to tell them what to do with the components. But unlike PC's, which are a collection of components made by a collection of manufacturers and assembled by other parties, the routers are all assembled in one place. Therefore the firmware can be written to be much more comprehensive.

Not all firmware is as basic as that on a PC. Firmware just refers to the base operating system. On PC's, that is basic enough to initialise and manage the hardware, then look for an OS to pass the rest off to. On Routers and the like, it is much more comprehensive. It is the operating system!!!!!!!

Kobem, I think You need to start at the beginning.

 

Drivers "translate" the language that the device speaks into the language that the OS understands. The advantage of using drivers is that you can make one device work on many different OSs simply by supplying a driver that knows how to translate to the language of the OS. The disadvantage is that you incur a performance hit because you have another step to go through.
A Cisco switch, for example, is designed to be used only with their software. There is no reason for taking the performance hit of using drivers because you don't need the flexibility of being able to change between different OSs. In other words, both the hardware and the software already speak Cisconese so there is no need for a driver.

 

I got it this time i suppose. For PCs, drivers are needed cos the motherboard involves pieces of hardware from
various manufacturers. Though, Cisco devices and parts of these all consist of Cisco entirely.

 

Hallelujah

 

For the sake of completeness, it might also be worth pointing out that my washing machine and microwave oven also contain firmware - and neither is a dedicated networking device...

 

Jonny and Fergal pretty much have it, the various terms software, firmware and hardware can be a little arbitary at times.

Software is called software because its 'soft', the idea is its malleable and 'easy' to to change. Now of course this is debatable because software can be quite hard to change sometimes...

Hardware is called 'hard' because there is a physical device you can see, theres a manufacturing process that is undertaken, a boards design must go through an expensive testing process before it get's RTM, bugs found late can be very expensive to fix, this is the origin of the waterfall process, the idea that you draw a line and never return, RTM in a manufacturing process is such a line.

Firmware is 'Firm', its in the middle, its not hard or soft, its software thats on a chip that can be relatively easily upgraded, this used to be an EPROM but now its normally Flash memory.

In all cases 'software' (logic or instructions) exist, its just how those instructions are encoded, all the systems are systems working with binary logic.

In the case of say a chip the logic is largely 'hard coded' into the device by the manufacturing process, the layout of the transistors goes together to make logic gates and the logic gates go together to make digital electronics circuits. There are some exceptions to this chips are 'hard coded' idea, flash RAM, microcode in CPU's and FPGA's for example, you could argue these are closer to 'firmware'.

Nearly every electronics device you use with a digital circuit in it follows these principles, DVD/CD players, washing machines, TV's, car engine management units, digital watches, calculators, microwave ovens, etc. This is A+ material, basic electronics 101, its not networking specific. I agree you need to go back and start from the beginning...

Many computers do contain extensive firmware, just the PC was originally built by IBM. They designed a firmware called the BIOS. Now Compaq and others wanted to make 'PC compatibles', in order to do this they needed to produce a 'clean room' reverse engineered BIOS. They succeeded and IBM lost the desktop PC market.

Today much of the BIOS is legacy and the real stuff is performed in software in either Windows or Linux etc. They still need some core firmware functionality though as any machine needs some firmware to overcome the 'bootstrap' problem.

All computers have the 'bootstrap' issue and virtually all solve it with firmware. In layman's terms 'you don't know what you don't know', its a kind of catch-22, when a computer is turned on, its got no software in memory, so how does it load stuff without a bootloader etc ? How does it read from disk, or the keyboard etc ? Bootstrap comes from, 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps', in other words a way to get up from nowhere, by using virtually nothing.

Drivers help in that they allow a computer like the PC to have an OS built on top of a HAL, they form part of the HAL in effect, the OS can communicate with a generic high level interface and differences in devices can be handled in the device specific driver. Most systems follow this 'layered architecture' approach.

Devices from one manufacturer that are less based on open standards or off the shelf commodity components do not have to be as flexible in their driver model. Possibly Playstation consoles or Cisco routers spring to mind, typically they will put all the drivers into one big firmware, and you take that firmware as one update, you don't patch individual devices, because to the consumer it is one device.

As Bluerinse mentions, as long as they don't controvert the laws of physics and have enough skills, knowledge, money, equipment and time, anyone can do whatever they want with both hardware and software. Many hacks are based on these ideals.

Quadrotor Autonomous Flight and Obstacle Avoidance with Kinect Sensor
Playstation Black Hole Vibration Model
FPGA Based Supercomputer
WII Remote Whiteboard

 

Didn't someone just say that?