re: ixg(4) performances

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

> Finally, adding cfgread/cfgwrite commands to pcictl seems like a step in
> the wrong direction.  I know that this is UNIX and we're duty-bound to
> give everyone enough rope, but may we reconsider our assisted-suicide
> policy just this one time? :-)
> 
> How well has blindly poking configuration registers worked for us in
> the past?  I can think of a couple of instances where an knowledgeable
> developer thought that they were writing a helpful value to a useful
> register and getting a desirable result, but in the end it turned out to
> be a no-op.  In one case, it was an Atheros WLAN adapter where somebody
> added to Linux some code that wrote to a mysterious PCI configuration
> register, and then some of the *BSDs copied it.  In the other case, I
> think that somebody used pci_conf_write() to write a magic value to a
> USB host controller register that wasn't on a 32-bit boundary.  ISTR
> that some incorrect value was written, instead.

pciutils' "setpci" utility has exposed this for lots of systems for
years.  i don't see any value in keeping pcictl from being as usable
as other tools, and as you say, this is unix - rope and all.


.mrg.