How Plug and Play Works


Whenever you turn on the Plug-and-Play system, the primary arbitrator in between Windows and hardware-the BIOS-is the very first component to take charge. The BIOS searches for all products it needs-such like a video card, keyboard, and floppy drive-so the PC can operate correctly. The BIOS identifies these products based on their distinctive identifiers, that are codes that are burned permanently into the devices' ROM, or read-only memory. The BIOS then passes control towards the operating system.

The configuration manager in Windows adds to itself unique gadget drivers known as enumeratorsprograms that act as the interface in between the operating system and the various products. You will find bus enumerators, enumerators for any special type of bus known as SCSI (small computer system interface), port enumerators, and much more. Windows asks each enumerator to determine which products the enumerator is going to manage and what options it requirements.

Windows takes the information from the enumerators and stores it in the hardware tree, which is really a database stored in RAM. The operating system then examines the hardware tree for resource arbitration.

In other words, after storing the information in a database, the operating system decides resources-interrupts (IRQs), for example- to allocate to every gadget. The system then tells the enumerators what resources it allocated to their respective devices. The enumerators conserve the resource allocation info within the peripherals' microscopic programmable registers, which are like digital scratch pads located in some chips.

Finally, the operating system searches for that appropriate gadget driver for each device. A gadget driver is really a small piece of code for Windows that tells the operating system the facts about a piece of hardware with which the system requirements to communicate. When the system doesn't find a device driver it needs, it prompts you to install it. The system then loads all required gadget drivers and tells every driver which options its device is using. The gadget drivers initialize their respective products, and also the system finishes booting.

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