COHERENCY DRIVEN ENHANCEMENTS TO A PERIPHERAL COMPONENT INTERCONNECT (PCI) EXPRESS (PCIE) TRANSACTION LAYER

摘要

Coherency driven enhancements to a PCIe transaction layer are disclosed. In an exemplary aspect a coherency agent is added to a PCIe system to support a relaxed consistency model for use of memory therein. In particular endpoints can request ownership of portions of the memory to read from and write to the memory. The coherency agent assigns an address range including the requested portions. The requesting endpoint copies the contents of the memory corresponding to the assigned address range into local endpoint memory to perform read and write operations locally. The owning endpoint may provide an updated snapshot of the copied memory contents upon request. At completion of use of the copied memory contents or upon request from the coherency agent ownership of the address range reverts back to the root complex and the endpoint sends the updated contents back to the address range in the system memory element.