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.