NAME
pnpbios —
introduction to PnP BIOS
support
SYNOPSIS
pnpbios0 at mainbus?
XX* at pnpbios0 index ?
options PNPBIOSVERBOSE
options PNPBIOSDEBUG
INTRODUCTION
pnpbios provides support for finding and attaching
devices by extracting information from the PnP BIOS of a machine.
SUPPORTED DEVICES
NetBSD includes the following
pnpbios drivers, sorted by driver name:
- com
- serial communications interface
- ess
- ESS Technology AudioDrive family audio device driver
- fdc
- floppy controller
- joy
- game controller
- lpt
- parallel port driver
- pciide
- PCI IDE controllers driver
- pckbc
- PC keyboard/mouse controller
- sb
- SoundBlaster family audio device driver
- wss
- Windows Sound System hardware driver
- ym
- Yamaha OPL3-SA3 sound driver
SEE ALSO
com(4), ess(4), fdc(4), i386/intro(4), isa(4), joy(4), lpt(4), pci(4), pciide(4), pckbc(4), sb(4), wss(4), ym(4)
HISTORY
The pnpbios driver appeared in
NetBSD 1.5.
BUGS
The pnpbios bus provides a different way
to attach devices than the real buses (e.g.,
isa(4)). The reason to use pnpbios instead of
the real bus is that some machines have weird routings of, e.g., interrupts.
The exact information about these things can be found in the BIOS, which is
why the pnpbios bus has a better chance of
succeeding with getting it right.
Many older BIOS implementations do not support PnP, and some newer ones do not follow the standards.