Plug and Play Glossary

Card

A physical card, also called an adapter, board, or node, that controls one or more Plug and Play ``devices''.

Device

A functional hardware subset resident on a Plug and Play card. Multiple devices, such as CD-ROM and joystick controllers, may reside on a single card.

Resources

One of the following hardware parameters that can or must be set for each configured device:

DMA

direct memory access channel

IRQ

interrupt vector

I/O address

input/output address through which this device communicates

Mem address

memory address for this device

Each resource can be set to either a value, to NONE (meaning that no value is required), or to OFF (meaning that the device is currently disabled).

For detailed descriptions of these parameters, see ``Configuration parameters''.

Resource configuration names

A set of resource values which the card manufacturer has defined. Each set of values is defined as one of the following:

Current

existing device configuration

Good

preferred configuration (highest priority)

Acceptable

lower priority configuration that is still valid

Sub-optimal

configuration that will function but should only be used if other good or acceptable configurations are not available or cause conflicts

A given device can have multiple instances of Good, Acceptable, and Sub-optimal settings.