PnP Bus-Attached FIR Adapters
This topic discusses infrared FIR devices that attach to a bus and that support Plug and Play functionality.
The same constraints that apply to FIR devices that are not Plug and Play also apply to Plug and Play FIR devices. That is, SIR and FIR components must both be programmable. In addition, SIR must support interrupts other than interrupts three and four and use at least the traditional I/O space of COM3 or COM4. These resources must also be either reported correctly through the system BIOS or described in an installation INF file.
FIR devices that support Plug and Play must report unique device IDthat accurately describe chipset and transceiver combinations. Standards for FIR device IDdo not currently exist. Note that an organization could publish known combinations of FIR hardware and suitable device ID. This organization could be, for example, IrDA or a group of vendors of chipsets and transceivers.
These FIR devices must be supplied with IrDA miniport drivers and installation INF files. The INF must list the supported combinations of SIR and FIR resources that can support Plug and Play for the IrDA miniport driver.
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.
An IrDA miniport driver for a FIR device should not load the system-supplied serial driver, serial.sys, as a lower-filter driver. A FIR device typically overloads the standard UART registers to provide FIR functionality. Using the serial driver as a filter precludes direct access to the hardware or IRQ.
FIR devices that support Plug and Play can be exposed with unique FIR device IDand standard SIR Plug and Play aliases. If the operating system can match the FIR device IDwith an IrDA miniport driver, the operating system installs that driver; otherwise, the operating system installs the serial driver.
FIR devices that are incorrectly exposed as conventional serial ports can only be supported by manual installation. In this case, the user experience is the same as described in Non-PnP Internal SIR Adapters or Internal SIR Adapters Incorrectly Exposed as Serial Ports.