SIBA(4)

📦 version 15.1, in freebsd 14.5, freebsd 15.1, nixpkgs unstable

🦋 SIBA(4) — the Sonic Inc. Silicon Backplane driver, explained by your fave 💅

okay so this is a page from the Kernel Interfaces Manual, and bestie, it's about siba — the Sonic Inc. Silicon Backplane driver. buckle up, it's actually kinda iconic ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

siba — the Sonic Inc. Silicon Backplane driver, no cap 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

so like, to compile this driver into the kernel, you add these lines to the kernel configuration file:

device bhnd
device siba

and if you'd rather load it as a module at boot? add this line to loader.conf(5):

siba_load="YES"

that's it. that's the vibe check 💖

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

okay so the siba driver provides bhnd(4) support for devices based on the Sonic Inc. Silicon Backplane — which is an interblock communications architecture found in earlier Broadcom Home Networking Division wireless chipsets and embedded systems. lowkey a whole era 🔥

there's a common interconnect that connects all of the Silicon Backplane's functional blocks. and those functional blocks? they're known as cores, and they use the Open Core Protocol (OCP) interface to communicate with agents attached to the Silicon Backplane. periodt 💅

each core can have an initiator agent — which passes read and write requests onto the system backplane — and a target agent that returns responses to those requests. but not all cores contain both an initiator and a target agent, and that's fine, we don't gatekeep 🎀

initiator agents are present in cores that contain host interfaces (PCI, PCMCIA), embedded processors (MIPS), or DMA processors associated with communications cores. like, they're the main characters of those cores, honestly 👑

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go read them, iykyk 🧚

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

the siba device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0. then the driver was rewritten for FreeBSD 11.0 to support the common Broadcom bhnd(4) bus interface. a glow-up, fr fr ✨

👑 AUTHORS 👑

the siba driver was originally written by Bruce M. Simpson <bms@FreeBSD.org> and Weongyo Jeong <weongyo@FreeBSD.org>. and the driver was rewritten for FreeBSD 11.0 by Landon Fuller <landonf@FreeBSD.org>. absolute legends, all of them 🫶💖

ngl, that's the whole page bestie — every flag, every name, every version, untouched. we ate and left no crumbs 🍓

this lil' page is from the Debian manual, dated September 13, 2017, and it's SIBA(4) — mwah, see u next manpage 💋🎀

📦 where this page comes from