My personal translation: setting "PNP OS = yes" allows your operating system to override interrupts (and other values) that the bios assigns to your hardware.
Example: when you put a network card into your PC and reboot, the motherboard's bios might tell the new hardware to "use IRQ 5". If, when your PC goes thru it's OS boot, the OS decides for whatever reason that IRQ 5 is not a good idea, it can do a software change on that value to something else. Personal experience (I'm not a guru, nor do I play one on TV). Flame retardant suit on. I remember when PNP was supposed to be the godsend to rescue us mortals from the horror of having to manually configure interrupts on a piece of hardware. It was probably one of the first "user friendly" ideas for computers; make them so that you didn't have to know anything technical, but just be able to buy some off the shelf hardware and shove it into a free ISA or PCI slot (my age is showing). IMHO, the idea sucked ass at the time, and continues to suck ass even now. I've always thought that setting "PNP OS = yes" in the bios is just an old leftover hack from ye bad olde days when when PC's were stuffed full of hardware that was either misconfigured with poorly written device drivers or conflicting IRQ's and buggy interrupt mappings that needed to be dynamically re-mapped by the OS just to get the damn computer to boot. I remember tons of people who went from perfectly stable Win3.x systems to a totally bug-ridden Win95 just due to the "Oh my god, I need to go from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95...I need a printer that will 'plug and play'" syndrome. My personal opinion? "No, you don't need an OS-mapped plug 'n play system, you need to purchase hardware that is properly configured. Otherwise, (usually at the most inopportune time), it will eventually crash." I've set "PNP OS = no" on every PC machine I've touched in the last 5 or so years (every flavor of OS, to include Windows, Linux and *BSDs). I suspect most everyone else does too. Most hardware today does what it's supposed to (and if it doesn't, reconfiguring it is fairly simple), so the need to have your OS remap low-level functions in software during the boot of your OS is simply a kludge. If you remember the old days when the slogan "Plug n' Pray" was common, you probably know to what I'm referring. On 9/16/05, J.C. Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi List, > > I realize the BIOS/CMOS setting "Plug and Play OS" on x86 has > something to do with boot time configuration of hardware (usually > resource allocation on PCI cards and such) but I'm really not certain > how this setting interacts with OpenBSD? > > Could someone drop-kick me in the right direction for reading > materials so I can figure out if/when it should be used with OpenBSD? > > Thanks, > JCR
