Good Day,
I can only talk about the AMI BIOS as I work for the Canadian Agent.
AMI tests every BIOS they port with the target hardware in their own Compatibility Test Lab. This uses a variety of operating systems and hardware configurations, ensuring reasonable quality. Once at this point, the BIOS has many customizations that would allow that BIOS to work only with the board it was designed for, though it may limp along with Interrupt Routing Table errors etc. on similar hardware using the same chipset. A custom feature of one porting job may appear to be a bug if applied to hardware it was not intended. After a BIOS is ported there are utilities designed to allow OEM customization, such as AMI BCP. (AMIBCP does not require knowledge of Intel Assembler.)
For those who do their own code, the new AMI BIOS Core 8 has 20% fewer files than Core 7, and comes with an integrated debugger to help in the debug process. This should help. If you are dealing with AMI, or any ISO 9001 registered company for that matter, ask for a "Non-conformance Report" or the appropriate ISO 9001 paperwork. They must have a formal process for bug correction and customer complaints. Nothing swings employees into action faster than the threat of getting more ISO paperwork.
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Good Day, I can only talk about the AMI BIOS as I work for the Canadian Agent. AMI tests every BIOS they port with the target hardware in their own Compatibility Test Lab. This uses a variety of operating systems and hardware configurations, ensuring reasonable quality. Once at this point, the BIOS has many customizations that would allow that BIOS to work only with the board it was designed for, though it may limp along with Interrupt Routing Table errors etc. on similar hardware using the same chipset. A custom feature of one porting job may appear to be a bug if applied to hardware it was not intended. After a BIOS is ported there are utilities designed to allow OEM customization, such as AMI BCP. (AMIBCP does not require knowledge of Intel Assembler.) For those who do their own code, the new AMI BIOS Core 8 has 20% fewer files than Core 7, and comes with an integrated debugger to help in the debug process. This should help. If you are dealing with AMI, or any ISO 9001 registered company for that matter, ask for a "Non-conformance Report" or the appropriate ISO 9001 paperwork. They must have a formal process for bug correction and customer complaints. Nothing swings employees into action faster than the threat of getting more ISO paperwork.