The motherboard firmware (also called BIOS, ACPI interface or EFI) allows the OS to find out the physical mapping of RAM and ROM in the system.
For example, this is the output of a booting Linux:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 0000000000098c00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000098c00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000000e6000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bfea0000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfeae000 - 00000000bfeb0000 type 9
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfeb0000 - 00000000bfec0000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfec0000 - 00000000bfef0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfef0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000ffc00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000c40000000 (usable)