New Linux Patch Series Proposes Gating "Legacy PCI" Support

[jabl]

From what I understand what they mean here by "legacy PCI" is not PCI slot vs. PCI-e slots, but PCI devices that use port I/O instead of memory mapping for sending and receiving data from the device. Which doesn't work on many(?) non-x86 platforms that have no such concept.

I don't see any risk that they'd disable that on default distro x86 builds in the foreseeable future.

[coder]

From what I understand what they mean here by "legacy PCI" is not PCI slot vs. PCI-e slots, but PCI devices that use port I/O instead of memory mapping for sending and receiving data from the device. Which doesn't work on many(?) non-x86 platforms that have no such concept.

Ah, yes. Makes sense, given what the article said about non-PCI use of I/O ports.

For those not familiar with the concept, here's some relevant background info:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...n-x86-used-for

My first exposure to ports was in the old DOS days, when you could perform port-level access using inline assembly, right in your own programs. Not that there weren't BIOS routines for many things, but people didn't always bother with going through BIOS or DOS. Of course, the more interesting VGA hacks probably weren't available via BIOS.