METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR AUGMENTED BUS NUMBERING

摘要

Methods and apparatus for augmenting routing resources. In one exemplary embodiment, a Thunderbolt™ transceiver incorporates a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus that supports hot-plugging and hot-unplugging of peripheral devices. Unfortunately, for various backward compatibility reasons, existing PCIe bus enumeration protocols can quickly exhaust the PCIe routing resources (for example, PCIe bus numbers) resulting in undesirable consequences (for example, crashes, dead connections, etc.) The present disclosure describes schemes for augmenting the pool of PCIe bus numbers and dynamically re-assigning PCIe bus numbers, so as to eliminate the aforementioned concerns.

主权项

1. A method for augmenting routing resources at a bridge device, comprising:
recognizing a default bus type transaction based on a default bus type identifier; responsive to an attachment of one or more subordinate buses, assigning one or more subordinate bus type identifiers; and for each subsequent transaction that is identified with a destination subordinate bus type identifier, forwarding the subsequent transaction to the corresponding subordinate bus; wherein a secondary device attached to the subordinate bus is configured to convert the subsequent transaction that is identified with a destination subordinate bus type identifier to a default bus transaction for the secondary device.