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Configuring Plug and Play devices

Terminology and concepts

Read this section if you are unfamiliar with Plug and Play terminology and concepts or you want to understand how the manager uses and updates system files and utilities.

Plug and Play Glossary


Card
A physical adapter, also called an adapter, board, or node, that controls one or more Plug and Play ``devices''.

Device
A functional hardware subset resident on a Plug and Play adapter. Multiple devices, such as CD-ROM and joystick controllers, may reside on a single adapter.

Resources
One of the following hardware parameters that can or must be set for each configured device:

DMA
direct memory access channel

IRQ
interrupt vector

I/O address
input/output address through which this device communicates

Mem address
memory address for this device

Each resource can be set to either a value, to NONE (meaning that no value is required), or to OFF (meaning that the device is currently disabled).

For detailed descriptions of these parameters, see ``Configuration parameters''.


Resource configuration names
A set of resource values which the adapter manufacturer has defined. Each set of values is defined as one of the following:

Current
existing device configuration

Good
preferred configuration (highest priority)

Acceptable
lower priority configuration that is still valid

Sub-optimal
configuration that will function but should only be used if other good or acceptable configurations are not available or cause conflicts

A given device can have multiple instances of Good, Acceptable, and Sub-optimal settings. It may be necessary to use one of the less preferable options if sufficient system resources are not available.

Plug and Play files and utilities


/dev/pnp
Kernel device driver used to recognize and query ISA Plug and Play hardware, and to allocate resources to that hardware.

/sbin/isapnpslot
Utility which uses /dev/pnp to extract current and possible resource information. When new resources are specified by the PnP Configuration Manager, isapnpslot verifies that the resource allocation is valid.

The PnP Configuration Manager
This utility uses information provided by isapnpslot to display adapter and device resource selections.

The Resource Manager
A special file (not directly viewable) that contains existing driver settings. The data contained in this file is normally displayed by using the Device Configuration Utility (DCU) or the resmgr(1M) command; see also ``Using configuration interfaces''.

© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 22 April 2004