Patent ID: 7373448

Claim:
A method, comprising: signaling, as part of a diagnostic operation with respect to an Input/Output (I/O) controller, a reconnection inhibitor over a bus to cause the reconnection inhibitor to perform an operation to access the bus to inhibit the I/O controller from accessing the bus; transmitting, as part of the diagnostic operation, by an initiator, I/O requests on the bus to the I/O controller, wherein the I/O requests are queued in an I/O queue, wherein the I/O controller is inhibited by the reconnection inhibitor from draining the queue while the initiator transmits requests to the I/O controller; signaling the reconnection inhibitor to perform an operation to cease accessing the bus, wherein the I/O controller accesses the bus to complete processing of an I/O request and process further I/O requests in the I/O queue in response to the reconnection inhibitor ceasing to issue requests on the bus; and performing diagnostic testing of the I/O controller when the I/O queue is at different levels, wherein the level of I/O requests pending in the I/O queue is controlled by the signaling of the reconnection inhibitor, wherein the I/O queue is increased by signaling the reconnection inhibitor to access the bus to inhibit the I/O controller from accessing the bus and depleting the I/O queue, and wherein the I/O queue is decreased by signaling the reconnection inhibitor to cease accessing the bus to allow the I/O controller to access the bus and deplete the I/O queue.