siba(4)

siba4

Sonic inc. silicon backplane driver

Usage

To compile this driver into the kernel, add the following lines to the kernel configuration file:

device bhnd device siba

To load the driver as a module at boot, add this line to loader.conf(5):

siba_load="YES"

Overview

The siba driver provides bhnd(4) support for devices based on the Sonic Inc. Silicon Backplane, an interblock communications architecture found in earlier Broadcom Home Networking Division wireless chipsets and embedded systems.

A common interconnect connects all of the Silicon Backplane's functional blocks. These functional blocks, known as cores, use the Open Core Protocol (OCP) interface to communicate with agents attached to the Silicon Backplane.

Each core can have an initiator agent that passes read and write requests onto the system backplane and a target agent that returns responses to those requests. Not all cores contain both an initiator and a target agent. Initiator agents are present in cores that contain host interfaces (PCI, PCMCIA), embedded processors (MIPS), or DMA processors associated with communications cores.

Releases

34 releases since FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE; the text changed 20 times.

  1. 9.0
  2. 9.1
  3. 9.2
  4. 9.3
  5. 10.0
  6. 10.1
  7. 10.2
  8. 10.3
  9. 10.4
  10. 11.0
  11. 11.1
  12. 11.2
  13. 11.3
  14. 11.4
  15. 12.0
  16. 12.1
  17. 12.2
  18. 12.3
  19. 12.4
  20. 13.0–13.2
  21. 13.3–16.0

History

The siba device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0. The driver was rewritten for FreeBSD 11.0 to support the common Broadcom bhnd(4) bus interface.

Authors

The siba driver was originally written by Bruce M. Simpson ⟨[email protected]⟩ and Weongyo Jeong ⟨[email protected]⟩. The driver was rewritten for FreeBSD 11.0 by Landon Fuller ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.