>That's an issue I haven't found clear words in the standards
>for. PCI2.1 does indeed say that the initialization is needed
>for boot devices, but it doesn't state that it is not needed
>for the rest.

Right, but I couldn't find anything that said you _must_ initialize all
PCI devices (I am guessing that requirement has been relaxed in 2.1).
So a system which only initializes boot devices can be said to be
compliant to PCI 2.1 (from my reading - other interpretations are
welcome).

>This all looks like the original spririt and letter of the
>standard is weakened silently, and there are business issues
>which prevents this from being said clearly.

Agreed.  Perhaps it was a push from Microsoft?  (nothing _that_ sinister;
perhaps they just preferred the OS allocating device spaces instead
of the BIOS).

>> This brings up the next question - exactly what _is_ the right magic?
>> We should be talking to the PCI BIOS, right?  How come we aren't?
>
>The PCI BIOS alone doesn't help much, it's for configuration space
>access and so. And even this brings only one additional level of
>uncertainity which can be avoided because the hardware interface is
>well-defined. (There are some chipsets known for violating the spec,
>but I guess there are much more buggy BIOSes around.) There is a

I guess the right question is, "What's the way devices are supposed to
allocate PCI resources?".  Is this via the BIOS, or by talking to the
PCI-host interface?

--Ken