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Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) [3] is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any given processor's native bus.
One of the major improvements the PCI Local Bus had over other I/O architectures was its configuration mechanism. In addition to the normal memory-mapped and I/O port spaces, each device function on the bus has a configuration space, which is 256 bytes long, addressable by knowing the eight-bit PCI bus, five-bit device, and three-bit function numbers for the device (commonly referred to as the ...
Prior to the development and ubiquitous adoption of the Plug and Play BIOS standard, an add-on device such as a hard disk controller or a network adapter card (NIC) was generally required to include an option ROM in order to be bootable, as the motherboard BIOS did not include any support for the device and so could not incorporate it into the BIOS's boot protocol.
The network controller implements the electronic circuitry required to communicate using a specific physical layer and data link layer standard such as Ethernet or Wi-Fi. [a] This provides a base for a full network protocol stack, allowing communication among computers on the same local area network (LAN) and large-scale network communications through routable protocols, such as Internet ...
The maximum goodput (for example, the file transfer rate) may be even lower due to higher layer protocol overhead and data packet retransmissions caused by line noise or interference such as crosstalk, or lost packets in congested intermediate network nodes. All protocols lose something, and the more robust ones that deal resiliently with very ...
Intermediate drivers sit in-between the MAC and IP layers and can control all traffic being accepted by the NIC. In practice, intermediate drivers implement both miniport and protocol interfaces. The miniport driver and protocol driver actually communicate with the corresponding miniport and protocol interfaces that reside in the intermediate ...
PCI Express Mini Card (also known as Mini PCI Express, Mini PCIe, Mini PCI-E, mPCIe, and PEM), based on PCI Express, is a replacement for the Mini PCI form factor. It is developed by the PCI-SIG . The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity, and each card may use either standard.
Being message-based (at the PCI Express layer), this mechanism provides some, but not all, of the advantages of the PCI layer MSI mechanism: the 4 virtual pins per device are no longer shared on the bus (although PCI Express controllers may still combine legacy interrupts internally), and interrupt changes no longer inherently suffer from race ...