PCIe device disconnect/disable needed to reprogram FPGA

For a PCIe device using a PCIe slot, the linux PCs that we've tried have behaved fine using regular linux kernels (Debian Lenny and Squeeze) - we haven't seen any weird events. There are no interrupt signals on the PCIe connector, so the NMI you are getting must be from the PCIe root complex or bridge and be due to the device disappearing.

If you don't have any known drivers for the device, does the problem still happen? We use insmod in a script to add our kernel modules, rather than tying them to the PCIe device/vendor ID. I could imagine that if the device is registered to a driver, then the removal of the device will cause the kernel to try to involve the driver in handling the removal. In our usage, we don't currently need a strong tie between the modules and the device, because our kernel modules only do app driven kmallocs for DMA usage.

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