Figured I’d give an overview of the latest PCI stuff for those of you that don’t drink from the lkml firehose.

The PCI linux-next branch was a bit more exciting than I expected it to be. We’ve got lots of good changes queued up. Some of the highlights:

• PCI slot detection driver (from Alex Chiang)
  This driver exposes additional per-slot information that can help users identify where slots are physically located, making hotplug easier to deal with.
• ROM allocation avoidance (Gary Hade)
  With the “don’t allocate space for ROMs” patch reverted, lots of address space can be gobbled up by unnecessary expansion ROMs. To prevent this on large systems, Gary added an option eschew ROM allocation, so that machines not needing access to the ROMs can use more of their address space for important MMIO and I/O regions instead.
• PCIe hotplug cleanups/fixes (Kenji Kaneshige)
  Kenji spent a lot of time working on improving the PCIe and other hotplug drivers. Things should be more reliable and the code should be easier to follow now thanks to his efforts.
• suspend/resume & wakeup enhancements (Rafael J. Wysocki)
  Rafael coded up quite a few improvements to our suspend/resume infrastructure, and fixed up PCI/ACPI wakeup while he was at it. The improved wakeup code should work on more platforms and in more situations than the old code, but we still expect additional platform specific quirks and workarounds will be necessary, so testing in this area is welcome. But everyone’s already setting their systems to go to sleep automatically though, for power savings & general “green” goodness, right? These improvements should make things like wake-on-lan a bit more reliable, so if you’re not already in the green camp, please give these bits a try.

There’s also an assortment of fixes here; hopefully we haven’t broken anything too badly…

The bottom line is this though: if you’ve been hesitant to try suspend/resume with Linux, or have had bad wake-on-lan or other wakeup event experiences, or you use PCI hotplug at all, this is a good release for you to try. You can report bugs to linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-pci@vger.kernel.org and/or http://bugzilla.kernel.org and we’ll take a look!

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