Support for PCI Express (PCIe)

Solaris Express 4/06: This Solaris release provides support for the PCI Express (PCIe) interconnect, which is designed to connect peripheral devices to desktop, enterprise, mobile, communication, and embedded applications, on both SPARC and x86 systems.

In the previous Solaris Express 1/06 release, PCIe devices were only available on x86 systems.

The PCIe interconnect is an industry-standard, high-performance, serial I/O bus. For details on PCIe technology, go to the following site:

http://www.pcisig.com

The PCIe software provides the following features in this Solaris release:

• Support for extended PCIe configuration space

• Support for PCIe baseline error handling and MSI interrupts

• Modified IEEE-1275 properties for PCIe devices

• PCIe hotplug support (both native and ACPI-based) by enhancing the cfgadm_pci component of the cfgadm command

• ATTN Button usage based PCIe peripheral autoconfiguration

The administrative model for hotplugging PCIe peripherals is the same as for PCI peripherals, which uses the cfgadm command.

Check your hardware platform guide to ensure that PCIe and PCIe hotplug support is provided on your system. In addition, carefully review the instructions for physically inserting or removing adapters on your system and the semantics of device auto-configuration, if applicable.

For information about using the cfgadm command with PCIe peripherals, see PCI or PCIe Hot-Plugging With the cfgadm Command (Task Map).