Does modern operating-systems use the MCFG ACPI table to find the registers of the xHCI?

Question

I'm working on a minimal hobby operating-system. I want to write a driver for xHCI in order to support USB keyboards and mouses. I'm using QEMU for virtualization. I'm passing the -device qemu-xhci parameter to qemu so that it emulates the xHCI. I was wondering if the modern operating-systems use the MCFG ACPI table to find the configuration space of PCI (and the registers of the xHCI)? I was also wondering how to enable PCI-Express in QEMU so that I can find a MCFG table in RAM so that I can support the latest technology in my hobby OS.

Answer 1

To find all xHCI controllers you search PCI configuration space for devices ("functions") with matching "class/subclass/progID" values (see note 2); which means that you have to find a way to access PCI configuration space first.

On 80x86; there are 3 possible ways to access PCI configuration space - 2 that use IO ports ("mechanism #1" and the deprecated "mechanism #2"), and one that maps PCI configuration space into the physical address space (called "Enhanced Configuration Access Mechanism").

If the Enhanced Configuration Access Mechanism is supported; the MCFG ACPI table describes how PCI configuration space is mapped into the physical address space. Primarily; PCI buses are described as "groups of buses", where each group (defined by a "starting bus number" and "total buses in this group" pair) has a base physical address, and the correct physical address for a PCI function is determined by finding information for the relevant group of buses for the requested bus number, then doing a calculation like:

physical_address = base_physical_address_for_group +
                     (bus_number - starting_bus_number_for_group) << 20 +
                     device_number << 15 +
                     function_number << 12 +
                     offset;

Note 1: because most operating systems use virtual memory it's possible for an OS to create a nice "virtually linear" mapping of the ("possibly physically disjoint") physical memory areas described by MCFG ACPI table (while using the same page full of zeros mapped as read-only to fill any gaps in the "virtually linear mapping"); so that the OS can use a simplified approach (with no need to find information for the relevant group of buses) like:

virtual_address = PCI_config_space_base_virtual_address +
                     bus_number << 20 +
                     device_number << 15 +
                     function_number << 12 +
                     offset;

Note 2: An OS doesn't/shouldn't literally search PCI configuration space each time it wants to start a device driver for one specific type of device. Instead an OS typically enumerates PCI buses once during boot (and possibly after boot in response to a notification if "hot-plug PCI" is supported) and starts device drivers based on the results of that enumeration. In other words, it's more like "I found an xHCI controller and need to start the appropriate driver" and not like "I want to start an xHCI driver and need to find the appropriate device/s".