Patent ID: 6954809

Claim:
An apparatus for monitoring computer system resources comprising: a queue; bus interface logic for interfacing with a serial bus and parsing a bitstream through the serial bus into a command and an address; a decoder for decoding the command, and passing a predetermined request associated with the address to the queue if the command represents the predetermined request for access to a resource bus whereon the computer system resources reside; an arbitrator, whenever the predetermined request occurs, for granting the resource bus to the predetermined request and allowing the queue to output the predetermined request associated with the address; and bridge logic for interfacing with the resource bus and transferring data to and from the computer system resources in accordance with the predetermined request and the address; wherein the serial bus is a two-wire interface compliant with the System Management Bus (SMBus) specification, wherein the predetermined request is used to request an I/O read transfer on the resource bus, and wherein the decoder interprets the command parsed from the SMBus as the predetermined request for the I/O read transfer on the resource bus if the command's value is 0xF6 in terms of hexadecimal notation.