Abstract
This specification presents a mechanism to provide automatic configuration capability to Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) cards thus enabling full Plug and Play in the PC. The essential elements of Plug and Play ISA are:
- Isolate the ISA card
- Read the card's resource data
- Identify the card and configure its resources
- Locate a driver for the card
The mechanism has the flexibility to allow cards to come up either inactive or active. Cards required to participate in the boot process typically come up active. Information that identifies the card and describes the system resources which are requested by the card, such as memory and I/O space, DMA channel, and interrupt level supported is maintained in a standard read-only format. This allows the Plug and Play software to identify system resource usage, arbitrate conflicts, and, optionally, re-configure a card. This process is done automatically at every hard reset of the system. Plug and Play ISA cards will inter-operate with standard ISA cards in a fully compatible manner.
Possible BIOS extensions required to support Plug and Play ISA cards are also discussed in this specification. However, user interface issues for installation of device drivers are not addressed.