Re: [RFC] [PATCH 2/2] kdump: cciss driver initialization issue fix

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com> writes:

> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 04:30:46AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
>> > Or is there a generic way to handle these situations? Fixing them driver
>> > by driver is a long painful process. 
>> 
>> Some generic way of whacking a PCI device via the standard PCI registers? 
>> Not that I know of.
>
> Somebody hinted that think of PCI bus reset. But I think PCI bus reset will
> require firware/BIOS to export a hook to software to so initiate PCI bus
> reset and I don't think many platforms do that. Infact I am not even aware
> of one platform who does that.

Not all pci busses support it but there is a standard pci bus reset bit
in pci bridges.

I don't know if it would help but it might make sense to have a config
option that can be used to mark drivers that are known to have problems,
in these scenarios.

CONFIG_BRITTLE_INIT perhaps?

It would at least make it easier for people to see which drivers
they don't want to use, and give people some incentive to fix things.

Eric