What is Plug-and-Play (PnP)?
If you don’t understand this section, read the next section How a Computer Finds Devices (and conversely) Oversimplified, Plug-and-Play automatically tells the software (device drivers) where to find various pieces of hardware (devices) such as modems, network cards, sound cards, etc. Plug-and-Play’s task is to match up physical devices with the software (device drivers) that operates them and to establish channels of communication between each physical device and its driver. In order to achieve this, PnP allocates the following “bus-resources” to both drivers and hardware: I/O addresses, IRQs, DMA channels (ISA bus only), and memory regions. These 4 things are sometimes called 1st order resources. If you don’t understand what these 4 bus-resources are, read the following subsections of this HOWTO: I/O Addresses, IRQs, DMA Channels, Memory Regions. An article in Linux Gazette about 3 of these bus-resources is Introduction to IRQs, DMAs and Base Addresses. Once these bus-resources have
