Auxiliary power support

[ball@prodsys.com (Tad Ball)]

Hi,

We're interested in developing a power-managed PCI device that is
capable of generating wake events from the D3cold state, and I'm
concerned about the support for auxiliary power in the 1.0 rev of the
power management spec.  Specifically, I'm concerned that there is no
standard way for add-in cards to get trickle power from the system. 
Near as I can tell, if you are not a motherboard device you have to have
some sort of external power source.  This seems bulky, cumbersone, and
rather user-unfriendly to me.

True power-managed buses like PCMCIA and CardBus have had support for
these sorts of devices for a long time, and I'm disappointed that the
PCI Power Management spec doesn't have similar capabilities.  What's the
rationale for omitting standardized trickle power?  It certainly seems
like any add-in that wants to generate PME to wake a sleeping system is
going to need it (functions like Modems, Network adapters, etc).

What do other people think of this?
'þ