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PCI Configuration Space
PCI configuration space is the underlying way that the Conventional PCI, PCI-X and PCI Express perform auto configuration of the cards inserted into their bus. Overview PCI devices have a set of registers referred to as ''configuration space'' and PCI Express introduces ''extended configuration space'' for devices. Configuration space registers are mapped to memory locations. Device drivers and diagnostic software must have access to the configuration space, and operating systems typically use APIs to allow access to device configuration space. When the operating system does not have access methods defined or APIs for memory mapped configuration space requests, the driver or diagnostic software has the burden to access the configuration space in a manner that is compatible with the operating system's underlying access rules. In all systems, device drivers are encouraged to use APIs provided by the operating system to access the configuration space of the device. Technical in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conventional PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) 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. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space. It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard (called a ''planar device'' in the PCI specification) or an expansion card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles, where it displaced the combination of several slow Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slots and one fast VESA Local Bus (VLB) slot as the bus configuration. It has subsequently been adopted for other computer types. Typica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. The dominant general-purpose personal computer operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 74.99%. macOS by Apple Inc. is in second place (14.84%), and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PC Card
In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and developed by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA). It was originally designed as a standard for memory-expansion cards for computer storage. The existence of a usable general standard for notebook peripherals led to many kinds of devices being made available based on their configurability, including network cards, modems, and hard disks. History The PCMCIA 1.0 card standard was published by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association in November 1990 and was soon adopted by more than eighty vendors. It corresponds with the Japanese JEIDA memory card 4.0 standard. SanDisk (operating at the time as "SunDisk") launched its PCMCIA card in October 1992. The company was the first to introduce a writ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel
Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learning * Kernelization, a technique for designing efficient algorithms ** Kernel, a routine that is executed in a vectorized loop, for example in general-purpose computing on graphics processing units *KERNAL, the Commodore operating system Mathematics Objects * Kernel (algebra), a general concept that includes: ** Kernel (linear algebra) or null space, a set of vectors mapped to the zero vector ** Kernel (category theory), a generalization of the kernel of a homomorphism ** Kernel (set theory), an equivalence relation: partition by image under a function ** Difference kernel, a binary equalizer: the kernel of the difference of two functions Functions * Kernel (geometry), the set of points within a polygon from which the whole polygon bound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux Kernel
The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix. Linux is provided under the GNU General Public License version 2 only, but it contains files under other compatible licenses. Since the late 1990s, it has been included as part of a large number of operating system distributions, many of which are commonly also called Linux. Linux is deployed on a wide variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices (including its use in the Android operating system), personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers. It can be tailored for specific architectures and for several usage scenarios using a family of simple commands (that is, without the need of manually editing its source code ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Option ROM
An Option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS. In its usual use, it is essentially a driver that interfaces between the BIOS API and hardware. Technically, an option ROM is firmware that is executed by the BIOS after POST (the testing and initialization of basic system hardware) and before the BIOS boot process, gaining complete control of the system and being generally unrestricted in what it can do. The BIOS relies on each option ROM to return control to the BIOS so that it can either call the next option ROM or commence the boot process. For this reason, it is possible (but not usual) for an option ROM to keep control and preempt the BIOS boot process. The BIOS (at least as originally designed by IBM) generally scans for and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plug And Play
In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resource conflicts. The term "plug and play" has since been expanded to a wide variety of applications to which the same lack of user setup applies. Expansion devices are controlled and exchange data with the host system through defined memory or Input/output, I/O space port addresses, direct memory access channels, interrupt request lines and other mechanisms, which must be uniquely associated with a particular device to operate. Some computers provided unique combinations of these resources to each slot of a CPU cache, motherboard or backplane. Other designs provided all resources to all slots, and each peripheral device had its own address decoding for the registers or memory blocks it needed to communicate with the host system. Since fixed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DIP Switch
A DIP switch is a manual electric switch that is packaged with others in a group in a standard dual in-line package (DIP). The term may refer to each individual switch, or to the unit as a whole. This type of switch is designed to be used on a printed circuit board along with other electronic components and is commonly used to customize the behavior of an electronic device for specific situations. DIP switches are an alternative to jumper blocks. Their main advantages are that they are quicker to change and there are no parts to lose. History US patent 3,621,157 is the earliest known DIP switch patent. The patent discloses a rotary style DIP switch invented by Pierre P. Schwab. Schwab's patent application was filed on June 1, 1970, and the patent was granted on November 16, 1971. The DIP switch with sliding levers was granted US patent 4012608 in 1976. It was applied for 1974 and was used in 1977 in an ATARI Flipper game. Types The slide, rocker, and piano types, which a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interrupt Request
In a computer, an interrupt request (or IRQ) is a hardware signal sent to the processor that temporarily stops a running program and allows a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead. Hardware interrupts are used to handle events such as receiving data from a modem or network card, key presses, or mouse movements. Interrupt lines are often identified by an index with the format of ''IRQ'' followed by a number. For example, on the Intel 8259 family of programmable interrupt controllers (PICs) there are eight interrupt inputs commonly referred to as ''IRQ0'' through ''IRQ7''. In x86 based computer systems that use two of these PICs, the combined set of lines are referred to as ''IRQ0'' through ''IRQ15''. Technically these lines are named ''IR0'' through ''IR7'', and the lines on the ISA bus to which they were historically attached are named ''IRQ0'' through ''IRQ15'' (although historically as the number of hardware devices increased, the total possible number of in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bus Mastering
In computing, bus mastering is a feature supported by many bus architectures that enables a device connected to the bus to initiate direct memory access (DMA) transactions. It is also referred to as first-party DMA, in contrast with third-party DMA where a system DMA controller actually does the transfer. Some types of buses allow only one device (typically the CPU, or its proxy) to initiate transactions. Most modern bus architectures, such as PCI, allow multiple devices to bus master because it significantly improves performance for general-purpose operating systems. Some real-time operating systems prohibit peripherals from becoming bus masters, because the scheduler can no longer arbitrate for the bus and hence cannot provide deterministic latency. While bus mastering theoretically allows one peripheral device to directly communicate with another, in practice almost all peripherals master the bus exclusively to perform DMA to main memory. If multiple devices are able to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities. In the computer and information technology fields, other definitions have been used that arose for historical reasons of convenience. A common usage has been to designate one megabyte as (220 B), a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory. The standards bodies have deprecated this usage of the megabyte in favor of a new set of binary prefixes, in which this quantity is designated by the unit mebibyte (MiB). Definitions The unit megabyte is commonly used for 10002 (one million) bytes or 10242 bytes. The interpretation of using base 1024 originated as technical jargon for the byte SI prefix, mult ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
