There are tens of thousands of distinct PC motherboard designs in existence.
I've personally worked on more than a thousand of them over the years. The
big issue is that even with a single distinct design (say a reference design
used by multiple manufacturers), there will be multiple differently-buggy
BIOSen for that board before you even consider the different versions a single
manufacturer will crank out over time.
The motherboard market is a lot less diverse today than it was at its peak --
say late-486 through mid-Pentium (94-97 perhaps). At one point, there were a
dozen major brands of core logic, and hundreds of motherboard manufacturers.
Of course, DMI doesn't come into much of the older ones.
Charles
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