10-07-2011
Think of PROM like the BIOS on x86 hardware. On SPARC hardware you manipulate those settings such as auto-boot and other options from PROM. You access it before the OS boots or by sending a break to the system. It's 100% command line driven unlike a BIOS. The eeprom tool inside Solaris allows you to view an manipulate NVRAM from the OS. Anything you change using the eeprom command won't take affect until the next reboot.
Do a man on eeprom and you'll see more detail.
Here is Wikipedia's arcticle on NVRAM:
Non-volatile random-access memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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LEARN ABOUT FREEBSD
nvram
NVRAM(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual NVRAM(4)
NAME
nvram -- non-volatile RAM
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file:
device nvram
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):
nvram_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
The nvram driver provides access to BIOS configuration NVRAM on i386 and amd64 systems.
PC motherboard uses a small non-volatile memory to store BIOS settings which is usually part of its clock chip and sometimes referred as
``CMOS SRAM''. This driver exposes bytes 14 through 128 of the NVRAM, or a total of 114 bytes, at offset zero of the device file /dev/nvram.
This driver is useful for cloning machines that shares the same hardware configuration and need same BIOS setting tweaks.
IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
The BIOS NVRAM's bytes 16 through 31 are checksummed at byte 32. This driver does not take care for these checksums.
EXAMPLES
Backup existing BIOS NVRAM to nvram.bin:
dd if=/dev/nvram of=nvram.bin
Restore BIOS NVRAM from nvram.bin:
dd if=nvram.bin of=/dev/nvram
SEE ALSO
dd(1)
HISTORY
The nvram device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 6.4.
AUTHORS
The nvram device driver was written by Peter Wemm. This manual page was written by Xin LI.
BSD
February 8, 2010 BSD