The term Legacy Plug and Play, also shortened to Legacy PnP, describes a series of specifications and Microsoft Windows features geared towards operating system configuration of devices, and some device IDs are assigned by

UEFI Forum UEFI Forum, Inc. is an alliance between technology companies to coordinate the development of the UEFI specifications. The board of directors includes representatives from twelve ''promoter'' companies: AMD, American Megatrends, ARM, Apple, Del ...

. The standards were primarily aimed at the IBM PC standard bus, later dubbed Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). Related specifications are also defined for the common external or specialist buses commonly attached via ISA at the time of development, including

RS-232 In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard originally introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data. It formally defines signals connecting between a ''DTE'' (''data terminal equipment'') such ...

and parallel port devices. As a Windows feature, Plug and Play refers to operating system functionality that supports connectivity, configuration and management with native plug and play devices. Originally considered part of the same feature set as the specifications, Plug and Play in this context refers primarily to the responsibilities and interfaces associated with Windows driver development. Plug and Play allows for detection of devices without user intervention, and occasionally for minor configuration of device resources, such as I/O ports and device memory maps. PnP is a specific set of standards, not be confused with the generic term plug and play, which describes any hardware specification that alleviates the need for user configuration of device resources.

ACPI Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto c ...

is the successor to Legacy Plug and Play.

Overview

The Plug and Play standard requires configuration of devices to be handled by the PnP BIOS, which then provides details of resources allocations to the operating system. The process is invoked at boot time. When the computer is first turned on, compatible devices are identified and assigned non-conflicting

IO address Memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) and port-mapped I/O (PMIO) are two complementary methods of performing input/output (I/O) between the central processing unit (CPU) and peripheral devices in a computer. An alternative approach is using dedicated I/O pr ...

es,

interrupt request In a computer, an interrupt request (or IRQ) is a hardware signal sent to the processor that temporarily stops a running program and allows a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead. Hardware interrupts are used to handle events s ...

numbers and DMA channels. The term was adopted by Microsoft in reference to their

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

product. Other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s, such as

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

Autoconfig and the

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

NuBus NuBus (pron. 'New Bus') is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus was done by Western Digital for th ...

system, had already supported such features for some time (under various names, or no name). Even Yggdrasil Linux advertised itself as "Plug and Play Linux" at least two years before Windows 95. But the term ''

plug and play In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resou ...

'' gradually became universal due to worldwide acceptance of Windows. Typically, non-PnP devices need to be identified in the computer's BIOS setup so that the PnP system will not reassign those devices. Problems in the interactions between legacy non-PnP devices and the PnP system can cause it to fail, leading to this technology having historically been referred to as "plug and pray".

Specifications

Legacy Plug and Play Specification was defined by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, which proposed changes to legacy hardware, as well as the BIOS to support operating system-bound discovery of devices. These roles were later assumed by the

standard, which also moves support for power management and configuration into the operating system, as opposed to the firmware as previously required by the "Plug and Play BIOS" and APM specifications. The following standards compose what Microsoft describe as Legacy Plug and Play, as opposed to native Plug-and-Play specifications such as PCI and

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

. *Plug and Play BIOS Specification *Plug and Play ISA Specification *Plug and Play Design Specification for IEEE 1394 *Plug and Play External COM Device Specification *Plug and Play Parallel Port Device Specification *Plug and Play ATA Specification *Plug and Play SCSI Specification *Legacy Plug and Play Guidelines

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

requires an ACPI-compliant BIOS, and the ISAPnP is disabled by default.

Requirements

To use Plug and Play, three requirements have to be met: #The OS must be compatible with Plug and Play. #The BIOS must support Plug and Play. #The device to be installed must be a Plug and Play compliant device.

Hardware identification

Plug-and-play hardware typically also requires some sort of ID code that it can supply, in order for the computer software to correctly identify it. This ID code system was not integrated into the early Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) hardware common in PCs when Plug and Play was first introduced. ISA Plug and Play caused some of the greatest difficulties that made PnP initially very unreliable. This led to the derisive term "Plug and Pray", since I/O addresses and IRQ lines were often set incorrectly in the early days. Later computer buses like MCA, EISA and PCI (which was becoming the industry standard at that time) integrated this functionality. Finally, the

of the computer needs to be able to handle these changes. Typically, this means looking for

interrupt In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, ...

s from the bus saying that the configuration has changed, and then reading the information from the bus to locate what happened. Older bus designs often required the entire system to be read in order to locate these changes, which can be time-consuming for many devices. More modern designs use some sort of system to either reduce or eliminate this "hunt"; for example, USB uses a hub system for this purpose. When the change is located, the OS then examines the information in the device to figure out what it is. It then has to load up the appropriate device drivers in order to make it work. In the past, this was an all-or-nothing affair, but modern operating systems often include the ability to find the proper driver on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and install it automatically.

References

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External links