I/O Kit Fundamentals: PCI and AGP

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PCI and AGP

The PCI and AGP family provides support for, and access to, devices attached to PCI and AGP buses and PCI bridges.

Bundle identifier:

Headers in:

References and specifications:

Class hierarchy:

Device interface:

None. Applications are not permitted direct access to PCI bus hardware for security reasons. Instead, applications should interact with higher-level services, such as those provided by device interfaces of the USB or other families.

Matching properties:

The PCI/AGP family permits matching based on Open Firmware or on PCI registers. See the description of the IOPCIDevice class in the reference documentation for details.

Check the Darwin Open Source project for example PCI drivers.

**Table A-8** Clients and providers of the PCI and AGP family
	Client of the nub	Provider for the nub
Action	Drives a device that plugs into a PCI bus.	Drives a PCI bus controller or a PCI bridge.
Example	A driver for a PCI SCSI controller card is a client of the PCI family but is a member of the SCSI Parallel family.
Classes	The driver communicates with its family via an instance of IOPCIDevice or IOAGPDevice. An instance of one of these classes matches your driver and loads it into the kernel.	PCI family member drivers should inherit from the IOPCIBridge class.
Notes	The most common client families are the USB, Network, SCSI, Graphics, and Audio families.	Mac OS X supports most PCI bus hardware with a set of generic drivers. In general, third-party developers do not need to write drivers for the PCI and AGP family unless they are building a PCI expansion chassis or developing drivers for a PCI bridge with special characteristics not addressed by the generic drivers.

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Last updated: 2007-05-17

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