/proc/pci design idea

Stephen Williams (steve@icarus.icarus.com)
Thu, 11 Sep 1997 18:57:25 +0800

I'm considering taking on the task of moving device identification
messages for PCI devices into user space. It makes little sense to me
to keep vendor/device names compiled into the kernel. Makes it ugly for
those of us who ship PCI boards with linux drivers as modules.

So I'm thinking of turning /proc/pci into the directory /proc/pcibus
with subdirectories xx (bus number) and yy under that for a device.

i.e. /proc/pcibus/01/40 identifies a specific device on bus 1, dev_fn 0x40.

That file would contain the 256byte configuration space for the device.
A user-mode program would interpret the bytes to make a pretty display,
if such a thing is desired. (Such a thing is desired by me:-)

I'm starting with a 2.1.55 kernel and I can probably have it working in a
few days.

-- 
Steve Williams
steve@icarus.com
steve@picturel.com


"The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  But I have promises to keep,
And lines to code before I sleep, And lines to code before I sleep."