Sustained Periods of Retries?

[Tom Keaveny <tak@core.rose.hp.com>]

Greetings,

	It has been observed that certain PCI adapters will retry
accesses for long periods of time, specifically after an initialization
event such as power-on.  My understanding is that this is typically due
to delays incurred in configuring PCI interfaces (ASICs or FPGAs) from
onboard serial storage.  I don't see anything in the spec that limits
how long a device can show this behaviour.

	I am curious, whether there any PCI adapters (or classes of
adapters) that exhibit sustained retry responses during normal operation,
and under what conditions.  Such behaviour it tolerable at initialization,
but could lead to reduced performance for that bus and perhaps the entire 
system during run-time, and I'd like to understand
whether this potential is likely or remote.

	Thanks, in advance!

==
Tom Keaveny
Hewlett Packard
tak@core.rose.hp.com