How to Reset/Cycle Power to a PCIe Device

devicespcipower-management

I have a PCIe device that only works correctly when the computer is fully powered off then on again. Issuing a simple reboot or reboot -p command does not appear to cycle the power to the PCIe card, which causes it not to work after the reboot.

Is there a way to, from the OS, cycle power to a device in a PCIe slot? I can find it in /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000*/, but I can't figure out how to properly reset the board. Toggling power seems to be the only way.

Barring that, can I change a setting somewhere that will cause a full power cycle on a reboot command?

I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 by the way.

Best Answer

Potential Method #1

I think you can do it with these commands:

disable

echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/slots/$NUMBER/power

enable

echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/slots/$NUMBER/power

Where $NUMBER is the number of the PCI slot.

lspci -vv may help to identify the device. This is not very well documented...

Potential Method #2

I came across this thread on U&L, similar issue: there are some answers to that question that say you can reset with this command: 

echo "1" > /sys/bus/pci/devices/$NUMBER/reset

However, I would read the answers there! There are conditions around doing it this way! Specifically I would read this answer!

Potential Method #3

There is a Unix command, setpci, that may give you a method for resetting a device in the PCI bus.

I did not see any specific examples with this command so you'll have to google for examples and look through the man page. I would tread lightly with this command until you're confident in it's use. From what I've read about it, it's manipulating the hardware directly and so there are always risks in doing it yourself vs. using a tool that is exposing this type of functionality!

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