* Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [040425 20:46]:
As a general rule devices don't need that and it is the responsibility of the device driver to enable/os to enable it.
How do other OSes besides Linux do this? Are they broken as well?
Unless someone can show me a relevant passage of the pci spec, that says differently.
I think we can allow fixes for OS level problems in LinuxBIOS to some small extent, even though fixing the OS is highest priority if the OS is the problem.
Any linux device driver that can't cope with a device that does not have it's bus master bit clear and needs it set is broken.
s/linux//. There's a lot of things broken that we cope with, ie the need for both mptable and pirq table seems like such a thing.
Devices with bus master set are allowed to DMA into main memory whenever they feel like it so it is dangerous to enable that bit indiscriminately.
--> If at all, it should be done with careful checking.
Stefan