NAME

       smbus — System Management Bus

SYNOPSIS

       device smbus

       device iicsmb
       device bktr

DESCRIPTION

       The  smbus  system provides a uniform, modular and architecture-independent system for the implementation
       of drivers to control various  SMB  devices  and  to  utilize  different  SMB  controllers  (I2C,  PIIX4,
       Brooktree848, vm86...).

System Management Bus

       The  System  Management  Bus  is  a  two-wire  interface  through  which  simple  power-related chips can
       communicate with rest of the system.  It uses I2C as its backbone (see iicbus(4)).

       A system using SMB passes messages to and from devices instead of tripping individual control lines.

       With the SMBus, a device can provide manufacturer information, tell the system what its model/part number
       is, save its state for a suspend event, report different types of errors, accept control parameters,  and
       return its status.

       The  SMBus  may  share  the  same  host device and physical bus as ACCESS bus components provided that an
       appropriate electrical bridge is provided between the  internal  SMB  devices  and  external  ACCESS  bus
       devices.

SEE ALSO

       bktr(4), iicbus(4), iicsmb(4), smb(4)

       The SMBus specification, http://www.smbus.org/specs/.

HISTORY

       The smbus manual page first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

       This manual page was written by Nicolas Souchu.

Debian                                           August 10, 1998                                        SMBUS(4)