Often times, a minor tweak to your system BIOS can greatly improve the industrial computer user experience. BIOS customization can be relatively simple, such as adding a customer’s company logo to the system boot screen, or as complex as reordering a system’s boot priority to match the unique system boot requirements of the customer. customer.

Either way, you want to make sure the system integrator you work with understands the configuration needs of your system subcomponents and how the SBC or motherboard BIOS can be optimized to get the most out of your investment in industrial computing systems. . Following is a list of the nine most common BIOS customizations requested by industrial computer users.

1. Change standard defaults – From changing processor operating parameters to device interface types, this is our most common custom BIOS request and one of the easiest to implement. The payback can be huge in terms of simplifying the end user system deployment process.
2. Embedded company logo – Another common request is to add the customer’s company logo to the BIOS boot screen, ideal for creating a branded solution.
3. Increase device bus capacity – For customers with many I/O cards in their system, this custom BIOS change can be a life saver in terms of avoiding unnecessary hardware expense.
4. Match specific IRQs – Sometimes certain system components must reside in precise system locations within memory. Changing the IRQ to match the needs of the system subcomponent can save hours of troubleshooting and headaches.
5. Custom retry logic – Sometimes a specific combination of I/O cards requires changes to the BIOS retry logic. A BIOS change like this can prevent system lockups during bursts of data traffic along the system’s I/O communication interface bus.
6. Adding boot delays – Legacy peripheral I/O cards sometimes have trouble booting on a system with the latest multi-core processors. This custom BIOS change allows cards to boot in the correct sequence and saves the cost of re-engineering a new card that may not meet all of the system requirements long established by the customer.
7. Change reset pulses – Adding additional reset pulses within the BIOS sometimes allows a customer to avoid having to change an I/O card model type due to system initialization issues.
8. Modifying I/O or memory resource requests – Frankly, I/O cards do weird things when they request system memory or I/O resources. The requests are often pointless and cause system misbehavior that can be eliminated by making a BIOS change that ignores unnecessary resource requests.
9. Change boot priority – Some client systems require a specific boot priority in case the boot device configuration is changed. This is an easy way to meet these requirements without incurring undue re-engineering expense.

In the world of industrial computing, BIOS modifications are quite common for users of single board computers and embedded motherboards. In some cases, such changes are necessary to ensure proper system operation, but many users know that such features can be adapted. Now you know, get the BIOS you need!