Patent ID: 7461244

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 the boot information 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), wherein the operation of retrieving boot information from the EFI environment of the processing system comprises retrieving device path designations from at least three EFI boot device selection (BDS) variables from the group consisting of: an EFI console-in variable; an EFI console-out variable; an EFI error-out variable; and an EFI boot device variable; and the device path designations are used to automatically identify at least one of the multiple devices as boot-critical.