Patent ID: 7877591

Claim:
An embedded system, comprising: a hardware platform having a CPU and a set of control features; a bios program, designed together with the hardware platform and stored in read only memory, to be executed by the CPU upon system startup, wherein the bios program includes code for setting up the set of control features for the hardware platform and for collecting and storing a predefined standardized set of abstraction data values in a standardized format; and an operating system having an interface call to obtain the abstraction data values, wherein the abstraction data values represent information required from the hardware platform for the operating system to be operational on the hardware platform; wherein the set of abstraction data items represents a minimum number of data parameters necessary to run the operating system on the hardware platform, and wherein at least one of the control features is selected from the group consisting of: clock registers, ebiu (external bus interface unit) controllers, memory controllers, GPIOs (general purpose IOs), xilinx configurations, and cache configurations, wherein the set of abstraction data items includes: a CPU clock specification; a timer clock specification; a memory amount; a memory start address; a system bus clock specification; and a hardware MAC address.