Bus management card for use in a system for bus monitoring

Abstract

A user-friendly, PCI bus-compliant plug-in management card is provided to evaluate a PCI bus in a host computer system for correct operation. The PCI management card is provided with a PCI bus controller ASIC for tracking error and fault conditions which may occur on a PCI bus and reporting such error and fault conditions locally or remotely over a computer network. The PCI bus controller ASIC may be implemented with a reset snoop which snoops the PCI bus for a bus reset; a clock snoop which snoops the PCI bus for a bus clock changing frequency or dying; a cycle timer which begins counting when a bus cycle starts, resets the counting when the bus cycle ends, and triggers an alarm indicating a hung cycle when the bus cycle has not ended after a predetermined time period; a cycle snoop which snoops the bus for any illegal handshake and any hung cycle triggered from the cycle timer; and an error capture which captures all error and failure conditions snooped from the reset snoop, the clock snoop, the cycle timer, and reports such error and failure conditions to a local processor for transmission to a host system, or to a remote system over a computer network for remote system management.