On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 05:59:10PM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > >
> > > In my BIOS, I have answered NO to the option where I can tell
> > > the BIOS that my OS is a pnp OS. Is NetBSD ever a pnp OS as
> > > far as any pc BIOS is concerned?
> >
> > By telling the BIOS I have a PNP OS, don't I give NetBSD a freer
> > reign in controlling hardware resources?
> 
> No, it turn off "normal" PNP in the BIOS, and instead enables a
> proprietary interface that only Windows 95 (and 98?) can use.

win95 has its own support for isapnp cards - so they can be used
in systems with bios that don't know about isapnp.
All (?) other OS that support isapnp want the bios to do the
device ennumeration and resource allocation.

On modern systems the bios is the only thing that actually
knows what io resources can be assigned to which devices, and
how to do that assignment.  'All' the os has to do is find out
what the bios actually did - left as an exercise to the os
writer by the isapnp designer :-)


	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk