Here’s something neat I found out about today: it’s possible to look up PCI databse information over DNS!

For example, if you’re poking around a new machine and find a device with vendor ID 0x8086 and don’t know who that is? Query for TXT records on <vendor>.pci.id.icw.cz like so:

$ dig 8086.pci.id.ucw.cz TXT +short
"i=Intel Corporation"

You can also get the name of a specific device by adding the device ID as another sub-domain, like <device>.<vendor>.pci.id.icw.cz. For example, if you had a device with vendor ID 0x8086 and device ID 0x101a:

$ dig 101a.8086.pci.id.ucw.cz TXT +short
"i=82547EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile)"

There are several more kinds of queries you can make; the source to PCI Utilities, specifically the function pci_id_net_lookup() reveals how to build the appropriate ‘domain name’ to query.