From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Sep 20 11:14:24 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA18929 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 11:14:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mickey.umiacs.umd.edu (12222@mickey.umiacs.umd.edu [128.8.120.49]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA18903 for ; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 11:14:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: (smpatel@localhost) by mickey.umiacs.umd.edu (8.7.6/UMIACS-0.9/04-05-88) id OAA04117; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 14:14:15 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 14:14:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Sujal Patel To: Janice McLaughlin cc: "'hackers@freebsd.org'" Subject: Re: Plug and Play naivety In-Reply-To: <01BBA6E0.7D655A60@ws40.freegate.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 20 Sep 1996, Janice McLaughlin wrote: > 1. mail from Sujal notes that "if your motherboard supports PnP > devices, then you don't need this code". What does this mean? > I've been told that the BIOS on the machine I'm using has > "Plug and Play" support ... does this mean it's possible that the > BIOS has queried the ISA devices on boot and already has all the > config info? Can I get at this somehow from the kernel? Or is this > only referring to PCI kind of Plug and Play? The PnP-aware BIOS will configure all ISA PnP cards (to the best of it's ability) during the boot up cycle. If the BIOS gets this wrong (which it often does), you'll need to either use the PnP driver or turn if PnP (if the device supports that option). > 2. I notice that the recommendation for other cards (eg: 3c509) > is to turn "off" PnP. That's sounds great ... how do I do that? Is > it card specific? When you do this to a (for example) 3c509, does > it stay off only until the next power up? or is there some NVRAM > somewhere that can store this info so you don't have to reconfig > it each time you reboot? Some cards like the Supra Modem's have no NVRAM, so you must use the PnP driver. The 3c509 has NVRAM which stores the configuration if you turn of PnP, their DOS setup program (on www.3com.com) will be able to do that. Sujal