Legacy features in PCI Express devices
Bjorn Helgaas
helgaas at kernel.org
Mon Mar 13 11:55:04 PDT 2017
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 05:10:57PM +0100, Mason wrote:
> Hello,
>
> There are two revisions of our PCI Express controller.
>
> Rev 1 did not support the following features:
>
> 1) legacy PCI interrupt delivery (INTx signals)
> 2) I/O address space
>
> Internally, someone stated that such missing support would prevent
> some PCIe cards from working with our controller.
>
> Are there really modern PCIe cards that require 1) and/or 2)
> to function?
>From a spec point of view, all endpoints, including Legacy, PCI
Express, and Root Complex Integrated Endpoints, are "required to
support MSI or MSI-X or both if an interrupt resource is requested"
(PCIe r3.0, sec 1.3.2).
The same section says Legacy Endpoints are permitted to use I/O
Requests, but PCI Express and Root Complex Integrated Endpoints are
not. There's a little wiggle room in the I/O BAR description; I would
interpret it to mean the latter two varieties are permitted to have
I/O BARs, but they must make the resources described by those BARs
available via a memory BAR as well, so they can operate with I/O
address space.
But that's only in theory; David has already given examples of devices
that don't support MSI, and Greg hinted at new devices that might
require I/O space. I'm particularly curious about that last one,
because there are several host bridges that don't support I/O space at
all.
Bjorn
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