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.