10-22-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Lost in Cyberia
hey everyone, just a general question. I did an lspci on my home computer, and it got me thinking... When I hear pci..I think of the physical slots on your motherboard. usually beige in color.. But the list returned to me is of atleast 20 items. None of which, (besides the graphics card) is plugged into a pci slot... Some things like memory controller, 1,4,5, high definition audio, Address map, DRAM controller, and the most bizarre, Serial ATA Controller... So does this mean, that these devices built onto the motherboard are using the same PCI bus that have the two slots on my board? And why is a SATA controller using a PCI bus? And lastly, how many devices can all comfortably live on 1 bus? Or are all these different PCI buses?
Don't get offended at my suggestion, but you might want to invest in a book that describes how computer hardware works. The concept of a data bus is not new, and a book on the subject would give you a better understanding.
The bus does not need to have any physical slots. Laptops use PCI bus, and have no physical PCI slots. The slot is simply to allow expansion, to add new things onto the bus. Also there is PCI which is a parallel bus with shared bandwidth, and there is PCI-E, which is serial with dedicated bandwidth in a star topology. Lastly, yes a machine can have more than one bus. This is most common in servers, which need to support larger I/O workloads than a desktop.
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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS
pcilib
pcilib(7) The PCI Utilities pcilib(7)
NAME
pcilib - a library for accessing PCI devices
DESCRIPTION
The PCI library (also known as pcilib and libpci) is a portable library for accessing PCI devices and their configuration space.
ACCESS METHODS
The library supports a variety of methods to access the configuration space on different operating systems. By default, the first matching
method in this list is used, but you can specify override the decision (see the -A switch of lspci).
linux-sysfs
The /sys filesystem on Linux 2.6 and newer. The standard header of the config space is available to all users, the rest only to
root. Supports extended configuration space, PCI domains, VPD (from Linux 2.6.26), physical slots (also since Linux 2.6.26) and
information on attached kernel drivers.
linux-proc
The /proc/bus/pci interface supported by Linux 2.1 and newer. The standard header of the config space is available to all users, the
rest only to root.
intel-conf1
Direct hardware access via Intel configuration mechanism 1. Available on i386 and compatibles on Linux, Solaris/x86, GNU Hurd, Win-
dows, BeOS and Haiku. Requires root privileges.
intel-conf2
Direct hardware access via Intel configuration mechanism 2. Available on i386 and compatibles on Linux, Solaris/x86, GNU Hurd, Win-
dows, BeOS and Haiku. Requires root privileges. Warning: This method is able to address only the first 16 devices on any bus and it
seems to be very unreliable in many cases.
fbsd-device
The /dev/pci device on FreeBSD. Requires root privileges.
aix-device
Access method used on AIX. Requires root privileges.
nbsd-libpci
The /dev/pci0 device on NetBSD accessed using the local libpci library.
obsd-device
The /dev/pci device on OpenBSD. Requires root privileges.
dump Read the contents of configuration registers from a file specified in the dump.name parameter. The format corresponds to the output
of lspci -x.
darwin Access method used on Mac OS X / Darwin. Must be run as root and the system must have been booted with debug=0x144.
PARAMETERS
The library is controlled by several parameters. They should have sensible default values, but in case you want to do something unusual (or
even something weird), you can override them (see the -O switch of lspci).
Parameters of specific access methods
dump.name
Name of the bus dump file to read from.
fbsd.path
Path to the FreeBSD PCI device.
nbsd.path
Path to the NetBSD PCI device.
obsd.path
Path to the OpenBSD PCI device.
proc.path
Path to the procfs bus tree.
sysfs.path
Path to the sysfs device tree.
Parameters for resolving of ID's via DNS
net.domain
DNS domain containing the ID database.
net.cache_name
Name of the file used for caching of resolved ID's.
Parameters for resolving of ID's via UDEV's HWDB
hwdb.disable
Disable use of HWDB if set to a non-zero value.
SEE ALSO
lspci(8), setpci(8), update-pciids(8)
AUTHOR
The PCI Utilities are maintained by Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>.
pciutils-3.5.2 03 October 2016 pcilib(7)