Non-PnP Bus-Attached FIR Adapters
This topic discusses infrared FIR devices that attach to a bus and that do not support any Plug and Play functionality.
In this case, lack of Plug and Play support specifies that the FIR hardware does not respond to bus enumeration or is not exposed through the system BIOS. If users attempted to install more primitive FIR hardware, they would probably not succeed. More primitive FIR hardware includes, for example, FIR hardware with numerous jumpers.
All FIR hardware is required to also support SIR protocols and speeds. FIR hardware typically exposes a UART for SIR, in addition to the DMA mechanism for FIR, to satisfy this requirement. This configuration typically requires IrDA miniport driver and installation INF file that are both complex. SIR and FIR components must both be programmable. In addition, SIR must support interrupts other than interrupts three and four and have the ability to use at least the traditional I/O space of COM3 or COM4. These resource requirements are necessary to avoid conflicts with conventional serial ports. These conflicts might be subtle and difficult to diagnose.
These FIR devices must be supplied with IrDA miniport drivers and installation INF files. The INF must list the supported combinations of resources and must be able to program the FIR hardware once the user has selected a nonconflicting resource set. The INF must describe any other parameters that are required, and the user must be able to configure those parameters. Other parameters include, for example, the type of infrared transceiver.
Once these FIR devices are installed, they appear to the user in the Infrared adapters element in the list in Device Manager, a Control Panel application. In addition, IrDA miniport drivers for the FIR devices are installed and they use FIR resources and the resources that describe the underlying IrDA UART.
To use IrDA UART resources, an IrDA miniport driver can load the system-supplied serial driver, serial.sys, as a lower-filter driver, but the IrDA miniport driver is not required to do so.
This configuration is not recommended.