On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Michael Jinks wrote:
> Like a lot of other common Micro$oft usages, PnP is essentially
> meaningless. All it really means is that the manufacturer has
> registered with M$ and supplied them with a driver for the device, which
That isn't really true. PnP is a real specification for configuring ISA
cards without jumpers. Yes, there are non-PnP cards which have DOS
utilities which allow you to change the settings (this ability goes back
to at least 1993 if not before). This is different from PnP, in which a
card does not have any resources assigned to it at all except for the
special "PnP area" which is (I think) part of the hardware reserved space
in the low 1MB of physical RAM. There is some sort of protocol wherein
PnP-aware software (such as PnPtools or win95) can query these cards for
the resources they require, then (hopefully) intelligently arrange the
resources in such a way that all the cards can work together.
Of course, none of this works very well in practice. :) However, the
pnptools are so handy at speaking this protocol that it is often easier to
configure a PnP device in Linux than it is in Windows, assuming you
already have the PnP tools installed on your system.
> I draw my admittedly hackneyed conclusion from the fact that Win95 PnP
> 'autodetection' just involves running through its list of drivers, loading
This is what Windows does for autodetection of non-PnP cards. Actual PnP
cards actually do have a query system which the OS uses.
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