PLUG AND PLAY

Plug-and-play (PnP) is a system which automatically detects devices such as disks, sound cards, ethernet cards, modems, etc. It also does some low-level configuring of them. To be detected by PnP, the device must be designed for PnP. Non-PnP devices (or PnP devices which have been correctly PnP-configured), can often be detected by non-PnP methods. The modern PCI bus is inherently PnP while the old ISA bus originally wasn't PnP but had PnP support added to it later. So often PnP is used to only mean PnP for the old ISA bus. In this HOWTO, PnP means PnP for both the ISA and the PCI bus.