Can't allocate resources for PCI video card behind bridge

From: Connor Behan
Date: Thu Jan 08 2009 - 14:31:56 EST


Hello, I am trying to use two video cards. One is the built in ATI Rage Mobility M3 AGP card which drives the screen of my laptop (Thinkpad a22m 2628-S1U if that matters), the other is the ATI Radeon X1550 PCI card in the Thinkpad Dock II which is supposed to drive an external monitor. X1550 is a PCI-E chipset but my card is a PCI card with an onboard PCI to PCI-E bridge. I first tried this with kernel 2.6.27 as packaged by Archlinux and got the following startup errors:

pci 0000:00:04.0: BAR 7: can't allocate resource
pci 0000:00:04.0: BAR 8: can't allocate resource
pci 0000:00:04.0: BAR 9: can't allocate resource

I've seen this problem discussed in the archives and couldn't find what looked like a fix. I WAS able to fix this by loading dock, pci_slot, pci_hotplug and acpiphp and appending pci=assign-busses. However since then I have run a package update to kernel 2.6.27.10 and I am once again getting the same problem even with the same modules and parameters. I have since tried appending irqpoll, pci=bios, pci=routeirq and acpi=off with no success. I have even rolled back my kernel to 2.6.27 (and the headers and a few other packages) setup my system the way it was setup before to the best of my knowledge but I still can't get the PCI card working again. Another subtle change must be responsible.

Certain PCI devices in the dock are working such as the Cardbus slots... but I could care less about them... is there a way I could tell the kernel to prioritize the video card and sacrifice Cardbus slots first if it can't allocate enough resources? Also my lspci output shows a large gap 01:00.0 to 06:00.0 so some part of my system must have expected other devices in that range. When I had the video card working it was 02:00.0. I have tried changing the four IRQ numbers in the BIOS but this is pointless at best and sometimes causes my soundcard to be disabled. My dmesg, lspci and (trimmed) kernel config are pasted:

dmesg: http://pastebin.com/f3ae15a58
lspci: http://pastebin.com/f5d7dee6e
.config: http://pastebin.com/fb925760

I'm hoping for a solution that doesn't require recompiling the kernel but I definitely would if that's necessary. In any event I'll be much more vigilant about system updates if I get this working again. Thank-you very much for your time.
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