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''.