Patent ID: 7484083

Claim:
A method for enabling the use of one or more BIOS boot specification compliant devices within an extensible firmware interface environment, the method comprising: initializing an option ROM configured to provide support for the one or more BIOS boot specification compliant devices to identify a boot connection vector for each device; executing the boot connection vector for each device to obtain a pointer for each device to program code for accessing the device, and storing each pointer; receiving a request to access one of the devices from within the extensible firmware interface environment; in response to the access request, reading the pointer to program code for accessing the requested device, substituting the pointer into an interrupt vector table for accessing the device using the option ROM, and performing the requested access from within the extensible firmware interface environment using an interrupt thunk; and setting the value of a variable describing the number of connected devices to zero following the execution of the boot connection vector for each device.