>So, IMHO, the latest revision of the PCI specs do not say that the BIOS
>is required to initialize devices connected to a PCI bus which are
>directly connected to a PCI-host bridge _and_ which are not necessary
>for boot.  This would seem to jive with my experiences regarding the
>"Plug and Play OS" setting in the BIOS.

That's how I understood it, when we looked into it for the gigabit
PCI NICs we built here.

>Now, if someone has information that conflicts with what I've presented
>here, then I think this would be an excellent time to bring it up so we
>could all figure out exactly what (if anything) we should do about this
>whole mess.

We know what we should do about it. We need to do the same kind of
initialization that the BIOS does for "boot devices", only for all
devices that arent configured.  See the thread 
	"a TODO list for cardbus/ PCMCIA support"

since one of the problems there is CardBus bridges which arent
completely initialized by the BIOS.  CGD refers to the BAR initialization problem
as `binpacking', but its exactly the same issue, AFAICT.