pnpbios —
support for embedded devices on the
motherboard
The
pnpbios 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.
pnp(4)
Compaq,
Phenix, and Intel,
Plug and Play BIOS Specification Version 1.0A,
May 5, 1994.
Compaq,
Phenix, and Intel,
Plug and Play BIOS CLARIFICATION Paper for Plug and Play
BIOS Specification Version 1.0A, October 6,
1994.
The
pnpbios driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 4.0.
The
pnpbios driver was written by
Mike Smith.
There is no explicit way to disable individual embedded devices. The
pnpbios 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.