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Introduction
Remember PC ISA cards (audio,modem, parallel and serial port controllers)?
You used jumpers to set an I/O address space for each card to avoid conflicts on the bus.
Manufacturers provided the information about these settings for each card.
For the average user, this configuration process was unreliable and frustrating.
The idea of PLug & Play is to optimally allocate system resources between cards and other
devices without user intervention. In other words P&P is autoconfiguration.
How it works
The major steps of auto configuration process are as follows:
- Put all cards in configuration mode.
- Isolate one P&P card at a time.
- Read card's resource requirements information (this information is written into onboard memory by manufacturer).
- Assign conflict free resources to each card.
- Activate all P&P cards and remove them from configuration mode.
BIOS software performs the above operations. After Windows operational system is loaded, it gets P&P information
from BIOS and loads device drivers.
References:
- ISA system architecture,Tom Shanley,Don Anderson,1995
- Plug and Play ISA specification.
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