To view information about installed PCI devices, you can type cat /proc/pci to view barebones (and somewhat cryptic) information -- or type lspci -v for more verbose and understandable output. The "lspci" is part of the pciutils package, whose sources are available from http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/pciutils.html. Generally, using the version of pciutils that comes with your particular distribution is sufficient. When you type lspci -v, you may see many PCI devices that you never knew even existed. More often than not, such a device is one of the many PCI-based peripheral devices that has been built-in to your computer's motherboard. These devices can be disabled (and enabled if they aren't currently visible) in your computer's BIOS, typically under the "Integrated peripherals" section. You can normally access your computer's BIOS by pressing the Delete key or the F2 key as your system boots.

The pciutils package also contains a program called "setpci" that can be used to change various PCI device settings, including PCI device latency. To learn more about PCI device latency and the effects it can have on your system, see the developerWorks article Linux hardware stability guide, Part 2.