This routine is called when the system is about to be shut down. It is expected to bring the hardware to some consistent state. For most of the ISA devices no special action is required, so the function is not really necessary because the device will be re-initialized on reboot anyway. But some devices have to be shut down with a special procedure, to make sure that they will be properly detected after soft reboot (this is especially true for many devices with proprietary identification protocols). In any case disabling DMA and interrupts in the device registers and stopping any ongoing transfers is a good idea. The exact action depends on the hardware, so we do not consider it here in any detail.