LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Objective 5: Set Up Different PC Expansion Cards

As described in Objective 1, when you add hardware to a PC you must accommodate the resource requirements of all installed devices. Your requirements will depend on the type of card, such as whether it is Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) or PCI. This Objective covers the technical details you are required to understand when configuring these types of devices.

Plug and Play

Older hardware, particularly ISA bus hardware, requires manual configuration. Exam 102 requires familiarity with these configuration problems.

Generally speaking, we may think about device configuration methodologies from one of three general eras:

Jumper era

This hardware was constructed in such a way that settings were controlled by changing the position of shorting jumpers on terminal strips. This method is inconvenient in that it requires internal access to the PC as well as available documentation on the jumper locations. On the other hand, it is a hardware-only solution, and the settings are obvious to the observer. Many such devices are still in service on older PCs.

Nonvolatile era

These more recent hardware designs abandoned jumpers in favor of settings that, while still manually set, are stored in a nonvolatile memory space. This design eliminated the physical access problem with jumpered hardware, but introduced a requirement that custom configuration programs be written, supported, and provided to consumers by hardware vendors. This software was ...