pciutils

pciutils is an open source and freely distributed command-line software, a collection of two utilities that can be used to list PCI devices from your computer, set the configuration registers of PCI devices, as well as to inspect their status.

In other words, the pciutils project is comprised of the lspci tool for listing PCI devices, the setpci program for configuring and querying PCI devices, the update-pciids utility for fetching the PCI ID list, and a PCI subsystem access library for applications (libpci.so). An example is also provided in the package.

Getting started with pciutils

To install and use the pciutils package in your GNU/Linux operating system, you must first download the latest version from Softoware, save the archive of a location of your choice (e.g. Desktop), and extract the contents of the archive with your favorite archive manager utility.

Then, you must open a terminal emulator and use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive file, as you must compile the software for your architecture. Once arrived to the location of the pciutils directory, type the ‘make’ command to compile the sources.

After a successful compilation, the lspci, setpci and update-pciids binaries will be outputted in the same folder, so you can use it from there or install them system wide using the ‘make install’ command, which should be executed as root or with sudo.

Command-line options

While the lspci and setpci executables come with various command-line, which can be viewed at a glance by running them with the --help string, the update-pciids has no options and should be run as is to update the IDs of your PCI devices.

Supported operating systems

pciutils is a very portable software that works with multiple operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX and GNU Hurd. However, it can also be ported to other systems as well. At the moment, it has been successfully tested with both 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.