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DCSE: PowerEdge 1550 Self-Study Version 0.3, 4 December, 2000
Page 64 Dell
Technical Appendix
Features
BIOS
The PowerEdge 1550 BIOS supports mainstream BIOS features. Some of
these are described here.
PnP 1.02a
PnP is an acronym for Plug and Play. The PnP specification presents a
mechanism to provide automatic configuration capability to Industry
Standard Architecture (ISA) cards thus enabling full Plug and Play in the
PC. The essential elements of Plug and Play ISA are:
• Isolate the ISA card
• Read the card's resource data
• Identify the card and configure its resources
• Locate a driver for the card
In order for a system to be PnP compliant it must have a PnP compatible
BIOS, PnP compatible devices, and a PnP compatible operating system.
The PnP 1.02a specification details how a PnP BIOS, PnP devices, and a
PnP operating system operate together to allow automatic configuration of
the devices.
ESCD 1.02a
The ESCD 1.02a specification provides an extension for the PnP BIOS in
which to store the PnP information.
MP 1.4
The MP (MultiProcessor) 1.4 specification defines how Intel processors
can be used to design IBM PC compatible systems that utilize the
resources of more than one processor.
The MP specification includes the following features:
• MP compatible systems will run all uni-processor compiled binaries
without recompiling.
• Support for symmetric multiprocessing with one or more processors that
are Intel architecture instruction set compatible.
• Support for symmetric I/O interrupt handling with the APIC, a
multiprocessor interrupt controller.