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Table of Contents
PCI Bus
Understand a PCI Address
The PCI address is a series of numbers like 0000:04:00.0. The full form is <domain>:<bus>:<device>.<function>.
The bus, device, and function numbers specify the device's location on the bus. We can break the device string “0000:04:00.0” down as follows:
- 0000 : PCI domain (each domain can contain up to 256 PCI buses)
- 04 : The bus number the device is attached to
- 00 : The device number
- .0 : PCI device function
Understand PCI Bus Structure
The 'lspci -tv' command shows a tree structure with limited verbosity.
# lspci -tv
-[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers
+-02.0 Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
+-08.0 Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
+-12.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller
+-14.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller
+-14.2 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM
+-16.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller
+-17.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SATA AHCI Controller
+-1c.0-[01]----00.0 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
+-1d.0-[02]----00.0 Micron Technology Inc 2200S NVMe SSD [Cassandra]
+-1f.0 Intel Corporation H370 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller
+-1f.3 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS
+-1f.4 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller
\-1f.5 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller
The portion in brackets on the first line ([0000:00]-+-00.0) is the domain and bus that everything under this point in the tree is on. This is domain 0000 and bus 00, which is generally the root of the PCIe topology. The first couple of devices are directly on Bus 00.
However, the following devices are on Bus 1 and Bus 2 respectively:
+-1c.0-[01]----00.0 Realtek PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
+-1d.0-[02]----00.0 Micron Technology NVMe SSD
This is not directly on bus 00; instead it is accessed through a device at 01.1 on this bus, which thus has the (abbreviated) PCIe address of 00:01.1. 'lspci -v' tells me that this is a PCIe bridge, as expected:
00:01.1 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 00h-0fh) PCIe GPP Bridge [...]
Much like the []s of the root of the tree, the '[01]' bit after it in 'lspci -tv' means that all PCIe devices under this bridge are on bus 01, and there is only one of them, the NVMe drive, which will thus have the PCIe address 01:00.0:
01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. Device 2263 [...]
sysfs PCI support
The Linux kernel represents PCI devices as pseudo-devices in the sysfs file system. Linux lists these devices in /sys/bus/pci/devices.
# ls -al /sys/bus/pci/devices total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 20 sep 14:25 . drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:00.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:02.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:08.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:12.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:14.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:14.2 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:16.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:16.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:17.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:17.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1c.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1d.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1f.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1f.3 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1f.4 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:00:1f.5 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.5 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:01:00.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:01:00.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 20 sep 13:53 0000:02:00.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/0000:02:00.0
