pnpbios (4)

Leading comments

Copyright (c) 2001
Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
   the first lines of this file unmodified.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, ...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/pnpbios.4freebsd".)

NAME

pnpbios - support for embedded devices on the motherboard

DESCRIPTION

The ifconfig driver enumerates embedded ISA devices on the motherboard whose BIOS supports ``Plug and Play BIOS Specification'' It assigns ISA bus resources (interrupt line, DMA channel, I/O ports, and memory region) to each device and activates it.

If it cannot assign necessary resources to a device without causing conflict with other devices in the system, the device will not be activated and will be unavailable to programs.

SEE ALSO

pnp(4)

STANDARDS

Compaq Phenix Intel "Plug and Play BIOS Specification Version 1.0A" May 5, 1994

Compaq Phenix Intel "Plug and Play BIOS CLARIFICATION Paper for Plug and Play BIOS Specification Version 1.0A" October 6, 1994

HISTORY

The ifconfig driver first appeared in Fx 4.0 .

AUTHORS

The ifconfig driver was written by An Mike Smith .

CAVEATS

There is no explicit way to disable individual embedded devices. The ifconfig driver will find all devices reported by the ``Plug and Play (PnP)'' BIOS and try to activate them all.

There is no way to explicitly assign particular resource to a device. The resource assignment is fully automatic and there is no provision for manual override.