> 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.
