What’s the difference between firmware and software?
In: Technology
Your computer has RAM and Storage, software is stuff that runs on that RAM and is located in that storage.
Many devices are like mini computer that are plugged into the main computer.
They have their own storage to do their own device things.
The stuff that goes onto that storage is firmware.
Your computer rarely does anything other than re-write it when updating.
The firmware is usually only ever used by the device to do device things.
firmware is a type of software, one that runs on a deeper level than your usual user-controlled software.
specifically it’s drivers for the hardware, usually provided by the company that produced said hardware.
I you want, you can think of it as 3 layers:
first the firmware, then the operating system software (your windows/macos/Linux) and on top comes the user-software (like your games or your browser). (this is obviously an extreme oversimplification)
Generally, software can be intended as everything that is not hardware or just the application layer.
Hardware -> firmware -> operating system -> applications
Software is basically everything running on hardware : oeprating system, games and so on. If it’s non physical, it’s software. Thus, you can install / uninstall software on your PC.
Firmware is a type of software which is specifically designed to work on a specified hardware. and help it to run. Instead of Software, you rarely uninstall or install firmware on hardware because it’s already here to help the hardware working. But you can update it
Firmware is a type of software.
The name “firmware” is kind of a play on words. If you have some piece of custom hardware, or special purpose hardware, the software that runs on it is called firmware. Since this is kind of a special type of software, and it’s closely related to the hardware it runs on, it’s called “firmware” instead of just software.
In the very old days, there weren’t very cheap or large devices that could permanently or semi permanently store computer code. (even through power off). Most computing devices power up the hardware (usually in some sequence) and have some basic things to indicate that the hardware is up and ready. The first thing a CPU does is go to a specific location and “look” for code. In the old days, this might be an EPROM (or EEPROM) or even just one time programmable ROM. This was the bootstrap code, this code would call other pieces of code and the task was to go through all the various hardware devices, make sure they were up and running and set them up for use (set up registers etc etc). This code was termed “firmware” because while it is “software” it is really tied firmly to the hardware. (This is pretty ancient)
In more modern devices, there is a bit more flexibility and the differences between what is firmware and what is “software” is not as clear cut. But generally firmware is still the software that is very closely tied to hardware devices and provides the interface to the hardware. Firmware probably now includes drivers etc that are loaded by the OS during bootup although these drivers might reside in things like the disk drive (which were not universally available in early days)
All ‘wares’ are just things that achieve some computational task, the prefix just tells you how difficult it is to change whats its doing.
Hardware, on a practical level you cant change what its doing, its an actual physical thing.
Firmware, possible but requires some effort to do it. An example would be a motherboard BIOS, which is a bit of an ordeal to flash to a new one.
Software, extremely malleable, you can just rewrite it to do what you want.
Vaporware, doesn’t even exist so its trivial to change what it should do.
Latest Answers