Patent ID: 8868891

Claim:
A method comprising: determining, during a process of booting a processing system, whether sufficient resources are available to meet resource requests for multiple devices associated with a peripheral connect interface (PCI) subsystem of the processing system; retrieving boot information from an extended firmware interface (EFI) environment of the processing system; automatically identifying at least one of the multiple devices as boot-critical, based on device path designations included in the boot information retrieved from the EFI environment; automatically determining whether the at least one boot-critical device connects via an intermediary device in the processing system; if the at least one boot-critical device connects via the intermediary device, automatically identifying the intermediary device as a boot critical device; and if sufficient resources to meet the resource requests are not available, automatically allocating resources for devices identified as boot-critical but not for all of the devices associated with the PCI subsystem, before the processing system boots an operating system (OS).