What Is Bus Mastering?

When you think of bus mastering, think of a master of the roads that don't have to stop at traffic lights. With this in mind, you can let your applications 'get through' while they're in control. Bus mastering is your key to peripheral independence. It's a way of communicating directly with other components on the bus without going through the CPU. The most recent bus architectures, such as PCI, support bus mastering. It is always that When a computer is under heavy load and the CPU is maxed out, bus mastering allows another device to take over the task of communicating with a peripheral. It can reduce CPU usage and will enable the computer to run smoother. For example, if you transfer a large file and the CPU is maxed out, the upload speed will be significantly slower than if you had a computer with a PCI that supports bus mastering. When you enable bus mastering, you can experience a noticeable improvement in the speed of your computer. There are two ways to help bus mastering: Installing a driver or utility program to enable or disable bus mastering on your computer or through the Windows command line. Bus mastering permits you to control the bus to access RAM independently from the CPU. It enables data transfer between a peripheral and RAM while the CPU implements other responsibilities. The most common cases where a bus master is used are accessing RAM-based device registers or reading and writing DDR memory. Bus mastering, sometimes called bus snooping or bus monitoring, is a unique communication method of sending data by directly accessing the memory without being blocked. You can do this if your computer supports it, and in most cases, you need a particular device like a network card. A device that supports bus mastering is called a bus master (like your network card or an internal modem).