Hi Maciej, On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 4:44 PM Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 6 May 2022, David Laight wrote: > > > It was retrofitted in that x86 systems already existed for ~15 years when > > > PCI came into picture. Therefore the makers of the CPU ISA couldn't have > > > envisaged the need for config access instructions like they did for memory > > > and port access. > > > > Rev 2.0 of the PCI spec (1993) defines two mechanisms for config cycles. > > #2 is probably the first one and maps all of PCI config space into > > 4k of IO space (PCI bridges aren't supported). > > This one is even more horrid than #1 in that it requires two separate > preparatory I/O writes rather than just one, one to the Forward Register > (at 0xcfa) to set the bus number, and another to the Configuration Space > Enable Register (at 0xcf8) to set the function number, before you can > issue a configuration read or write to a device. So you need MP locking > too. > > NB only peer bridges aren't supported with this mechanism, normal PCI-PCI > bridges are, via the Forward Register. > > > #1 requires a pair of accesses (and SMP locking). > > > > Neither is really horrid. > > Both are. First neither is MP-safe and second both are indirect in that > you need to poke at some chipset registers before you can issue the actual > read or write. > > Sane access would require a single CPU instruction to read or write from > the configuration space. To access the conventional PCI configuration > space in a direct linear manner you need 256 * 21 * 8 * 256 = 10.5MiB of > address space. Such amount of address space seems affordable even with > 32-bit systems. Won't have fit in the legacy 1 MiB space ("640 KiB..."). Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds