[SWLUG] Detecting ISA devices

[Robert McQueen]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 16:56, Tim Shapcott wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Does anyone know if there is a simple way of detecting any ISA devices in 
> a machine, similar to lspci? If not, does anyone know of a program that 
> does probe the ISA bus, that I could borrow some code from? I am not 
> particularly C-literate and I only have a short time in which to complete 
> my project, so unfortunately learning C to such a degree that I could do 
> this myself is not an option otherwise I would definitely do this!
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Tim

Well, there are two classes of ISA devices. There are those which are
Plug and Play, and there are those which aren't. For those which aren't,
you're SOL - there's no surefire way of detecting these. They sit on a
certain address range, and unless you know what you're looking for, and
reasonable ranges where you might find it if you poke, you have no
chance of finding it. You also have a chance of hitting some random
other device and crashing your system.

To combat this, Plug and Play devised some way of ISA cards identifying
themselves to the BIOS and/or OS. In Linux the isapnptools package can
show listings of these cards, in particular the pnpdump program, or the
libisapnp library it uses.

However this program is mostly deprecated, since a) nobody has a great
number of ISA devices, because ISA sucks anyway, right? b) since early
2.4, the kernel has had its own code to look for PnP devices and give
them addresses and match them up with drivers the kernel has.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Rob