Non-Plug and Play External Serial-Attached SIR Adapters
Infrared SIR devices that attach to an external serial port and that do not support any Plug and Play functionality are supported by the IrDA miniport driver that is supplied by the operating system, irsir.sys. This system-supplied IrDA miniport driver uses services that are provided by a serial driver to access the serial port. The serial driver can be the one that is supplied by the operating system, serial.sys, or a compatible third-party serial driver.
The external serial port is visible to the user in the Ports (COM & LPT) element in the list in Device Manager, a Control Panel application. The system-supplied IrDA miniport driver ignores the specific settings of the serial port. Therefore, a user cannot incorrectly configure the serial port so that infrared devices that are attached to an external serial port do not work.
The user must manually install these devices through the Add New Hardware function of the Hardware Wizard. The user should select:
The type of IrDA adapter device.
The IrDA adapter device from the list of supported adapter types.
The serial port to which the adapter is attached. The serial port is selected by its name.
The system-supplied IrDA miniport driver opens the selected serial port from the name that was selected by the user. The resources that are required to support the port are not visible to or configurable by the user through any user interface of the IrDA adapter. The user can only configure the serial port name.
Vendors who want support for their hardware in the operating system should request such support and provide procedures for device-specific initialization and speed change.