PCI I/O Address Space

PCI supports 32-bit I/O space. I/O space can be accessed differently on different platforms. Processors with special I/O instructions, like the Intel processor family, access the I/O space with in and out instructions. Machines without special I/O instructions will map to the address locations corresponding to the PCI host bridge in the host address domain. When the processor accesses the memory-mapped addresses, an I/O request will be sent to the PCI host bridge, which then translates the addresses into I/O cycles and puts them on the PCI bus. Memory-mapped I/O is performed by the native load/store instructions of the processor.