The ISA devices are described in the kernel configuration file like:

device xxx0 at isa? port 0x300 irq 10 drq 5
       iomem 0xd0000 flags 0x1 sensitive

The values of port, IRQ and so on are converted to the resource values associated with the device. They are optional, depending on the device's needs and abilities for auto-configuration. For example, some devices do not need DRQ at all and some allow the driver to read the IRQ setting from the device configuration ports. If a machine has multiple ISA buses the exact bus may be specified in the configuration line, like isa0 or isa1, otherwise the device would be searched for on all the ISA buses.

sensitive is a resource requesting that this device must be probed before all non-sensitive devices. It is supported but does not seem to be used in any current driver.

For legacy ISA devices in many cases the drivers are still able to detect the configuration parameters. But each device to be configured in the system must have a config line. If two devices of some type are installed in the system but there is only one configuration line for the corresponding driver, ie:

device xxx0 at isa?

then only one device will be configured.

But for the devices supporting automatic identification by the means of Plug-n-Play or some proprietary protocol one configuration line is enough to configure all the devices in the system, like the one above or just simply:

device xxx at isa?

If a driver supports both auto-identified and legacy devices and both kinds are installed at once in one machine then it is enough to describe in the config file the legacy devices only. The auto-identified devices will be added automatically.

When an ISA bus is auto-configured the events happen as follows:

All the drivers' identify routines (including the PnP identify routine which identifies all the PnP devices) are called in random order. As they identify the devices they add them to the list on the ISA bus. Normally the drivers' identify routines associate their drivers with the new devices. The PnP identify routine does not know about the other drivers yet so it does not associate any with the new devices it adds.

The PnP devices are put to sleep using the PnP protocol to prevent them from being probed as legacy devices.

The probe routines of non-PnP devices marked as sensitive are called. If probe for a device went successfully, the attach routine is called for it.

The probe and attach routines of all non-PNP devices are called likewise.

The PnP devices are brought back from the sleep state and assigned the resources they request: I/O and memory address ranges, IRQs and DRQs, all of them not conflicting with the attached legacy devices.

Then for each PnP device the probe routines of all the present ISA drivers are called. The first one that claims the device gets attached. It is possible that multiple drivers would claim the device with different priority; in this case, the highest-priority driver wins. The probe routines must call ISA_PNP_PROBE() to compare the actual PnP ID with the list of the IDs supported by the driver and if the ID is not in the table return failure. That means that absolutely every driver, even the ones not supporting any PnP devices must call ISA_PNP_PROBE(), at least with an empty PnP ID table to return failure on unknown PnP devices.

The probe routine returns a positive value (the error code) on error, zero or negative value on success.

The negative return values are used when a PnP device supports multiple interfaces. For example, an older compatibility interface and a newer advanced interface which are supported by different drivers. Then both drivers would detect the device. The driver which returns a higher value in the probe routine takes precedence (in other words, the driver returning 0 has highest precedence, returning -1 is next, returning -2 is after it and so on). In result the devices which support only the old interface will be handled by the old driver (which should return -1 from the probe routine) while the devices supporting the new interface as well will be handled by the new driver (which should return 0 from the probe routine). If multiple drivers return the same value then the one called first wins. So if a driver returns value 0 it may be sure that it won the priority arbitration.

The device-specific identify routines can also assign not a driver but a class of drivers to the device. Then all the drivers in the class are probed for this device, like the case with PnP. This feature is not implemented in any existing driver and is not considered further in this document.

Because the PnP devices are disabled when probing the legacy devices they will not be attached twice (once as legacy and once as PnP). But in case of device-dependent identify routines it is the responsibility of the driver to make sure that the same device will not be attached by the driver twice: once as legacy user-configured and once as auto-identified.

Another practical consequence for the auto-identified devices (both PnP and device-specific) is that the flags can not be passed to them from the kernel configuration file. So they must either not use the flags at all or use the flags from the device unit 0 for all the auto-identified devices or use the sysctl interface instead of flags.

Other unusual configurations may be accommodated by accessing the configuration resources directly with functions of families resource_query_*() and resource_*_value(). Their implementations are located in kern/subr_bus.c. The old IDE disk driver i386/isa/wd.c contains examples of such use. But the standard means of configuration must always be preferred. Leave parsing the configuration resources to the bus configuration code.