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Date:      Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:24:14 -0500 (EST)
From:      Sujal Patel <smpatel@wam.umd.edu>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>
Cc:        "FreeBSD Hacker's list" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeDetect & Plug n Play 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.91.960103101120.2728A-100000@sl-000.sl.cybercomm.net>
In-Reply-To: <1142.820668770@critter.tfs.com>

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On Wed, 3 Jan 1996, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> > > Is anyone looking into Plug&Play?
> > 
> > That will be nice, though I daresay that it's the ISA devices we'll
> > be having the most fun with.
> 
> There actually is a P&P for ISA, where the motherboard completely disables
> all but one slot, so you know what you found where.

I have two PnP ISA Cards that do just this.   It's really annoying 
initializing these cards in DOS everytime I reboot.  I've got some code 
written, enough to detect the cards, isolate each one, and dump resource 
data..  Hopefully, this week I'll be able to at least get code to 
hardwire the cards down to a specfic IRQ, DMA, IOPORT...

The interesting task will trying to use PnP cards as they were intended
(to configure themselves automatically).  As far as I can tell, the DOS
configuration manager uses these criteria to determine what resources to
assign to what cards. 

1:  Consult EISA-bios configuration information (if this system is EISA).
2:  Consult configuration written by Intel's ICU program.
3:  For IO-Ports, conflict detection/resolution seems to be part of 
	Intel's PnP specification.
4:  Of course, remember what resouces you assign other PnP cards, and 
	don't conflict with those cards.

The question is, what does the DOS configuration manager do with 
computers that have PnP-Bios (I guess these are mostly PCI systems).  

Also, how would FreeBSD handle initializing PnP ISA cards.  One way would 
be to probe all non-PnP devices first, and then use what resources 
are left over-  but this seems like it would get pretty ugly.  You could 
also just hardwire PnP cards down to specific resources in the kernel 
config- but this isn't really "Plug-n-Play".  OR you could do what the 
DOS configuration manager does, but that seems like a lot of work.


Sujal




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