Reading root bridge resources

Reading root bridge resources

[Rajesh Shah]

Greg,
A while back I had volunteered to write a patch that stores the
resource ranges being decoded by root bridges for ACPI based 
i386 and x86_64 systems. The thread at:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10604487
has some context regarding this. The basic intent was to allow
hot-plugged devices sitting directly under a root bridge (versus
under a p2p bridge) to claim the correct resources. The current
code in pci_scan_bus_parented() simply assigns ioport_resource
and iomem_resource to each root bridge, even if it decodes a
subset of those resources.

I did such a patch recently, and ran into problems while testing
it. I made the changes in arch/i386, just like Matthew had done
for arch/ia64. I found that ACPI firmware on some systems was
not reporting the correct resources in the _CRS method per the 
ACPI specification. On other systems, there were too many resource
ranges to fit in the 4 slots available in the pci_bus structure. 
Getting an inaccurate picture of root bridge resources broke 2 of
my test systems, since some devices failed to claim resources at 
boot time even though they were otherwise properly configured by
BIOS. 

I am therefore inclined to just drop this patch. This may break
hotplug on systems that support hotplug slots directly connected
to the root bridge. If a slot is under a p2p bridge, we already
read bridge bases correctly so this problem does not affect us.
Note however that I was not able to find any such i386 or x86_64
machine anyway. Does somebody have access to such a machine? Any 
other suggestions?

Note that a similar patch went into 2.6.11-mm4'ish for ia64. I
haven't heard of any breakage there, so apparently ia64 system
firmware is better behaved.

Rajesh