Abstract: A high performance serial bus operating at multiple transmission rates is disclosed. The serial bus is able to automatically generate data response packets for return to a requesting node. The automatic packet generation uses the source and destination information to generate a return destination packet for directing the requested data to the request source destination. Since the bus network is capable of operating at several different transmission rates, the speed at which the data request packet was transmitted is used for retransmitting the data requested back to the source node requesting the data.

Abstract: A computer system allows for a hardware structure to participate in the transmission of P1394 packets, which are comprised of command or data blocks from linked list structures in a system memory, is disclosed. The system is able to provide dynamic appending of these command or data blocks to the link list while they are being operated upon. This provides an efficient transaction layer operation, which minimizes signalling between the link list operator or control code, and other hardware features.