Capabilities: <available only to root>?
 

I see this message (see Subject) plastered all over these forums as people do listings of the devices in their machines. But nowhere do I see anyone explain why this message exists and how it can be "fixed?"

I recently installed an NEC PCI card to get 4 USB 2.0 ports in our system. Looking at three PCI entries for this NEC card, I see this "Capabilities" message. And while the message doesn't particularly bother me, what does bother me is that root is the only user that can access these USB ports. What gives? Is there anything I can do to change the permissions on something so all other users have access to this PCI card and its USB ports?

Thanks!

All users can make use of the card. The message you listed indicates that regular users cannot see its list of 'Capabilities' via lspci because it requires hardware-level access only available to root. Rest assured, regular users can still plug things into those USB ports and use them.

Thank you for the clarification!

However, when I run the software that came with a third party USB device, I get a nasty error about the device being unavailable. When I run the software as root everything works just fine. I had attributed it to this Capabilities message but you're saying that's not the case. Any thoughts?

maybe the software is a script or something that runs other programs like lspci etc. and the script will need to run under the uid of root in order to execute those programs?

just a guess since yo udidn't post the error message (any say "permission denied" ?)

No, I'm getting "could not claim interface 0: Operation not permitted"

Could it be related to the two "driver" files that I had to copy into /etc/hotplug/usb? Both files belong to root.root and have permissions of 755.

yes that is your problem, 755 is rwxr_xr_x so the owner (root can write to it, but no-one else can)

i would NOT reccomend making it writable to everyone, instead you could create a group called USB and chgrp those files to have USB as their group, and add yourself into the USB group then set permissions as 775. Just my 2 pence worth

Thanks for the help! I will give it a try.

Cheers!

Since I am the only user on this machine, I tried changing the permissions to 777. Unfortunately this did not fix the problem and I still getting the message about "Operation not permitted".

what is the software? what format is it in? are there an ydocs with it?

The software consists of a C library that gets linked into our main application. And there were obviously two files supplied which were the USB drivers that were put into /etc/hotplug/usb (mentioned earlier). The hardware plugs into the USB port and provides a low-level hardware diagnostic interface (JTAG) to an evaluation processor board.

As I mentioned earlier, everything works fine as long as you are root. So I'm guessing that there's nothing wrong with the software supplied by the vendor but this has something to do with access to the NEC USB card that we're trying to go through to get to the external hardware.

And I've been in talks with the vendor tech folks but haven't received anything useful as of yet.