The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 01, 1999
Filed:
Apr. 01, 1997
Mark S Shipman, Portland, OR (US);
Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A method of recognizineg peripheral devices coupled to an interface such as an Integrated Device Electronics interface provides a logically sequential addressing scheme for peripheral devices that may not have physically contiguous or sequential addresses. The method enables operating systems that otherwise only support sequentially ordered drives to support access to devices coupled to the interface in any order. The method includes the step of copying a basic input/output (BIOS) device configuration table and a (BIOS) device parameter table into memory. The existence of any device coupled to the interface is tested using every physical device identifier supported by the size of the device configuration table. For each detected device 1) the configuration table is modified to indicate that the detected device is coupled to the interface, wherein the detected device is assigned a logical identifier sequential to that of any previously detected device; and 2) the device parameter table is modified to indicate parameters associated with the detected device. Thereafter, a specified device identifier is translated to a specified physical device identifier in response to an operating system request to access a selected device identified by the specified device identifier. The specified physical device identifier is then used to access a specified physical device in accordance with the configuration and device parameter tables.