Root permissions should not be a requirement?

[gabhijit]

After looking at all the options available through --help. It looks like this is a read-only access to pci config space. So ideally root access should not be a requirement.

Also took a quick look at sysfs - /sys/pci/devices/

ls -rtl /sys/devices/pci0000\:00/0000\:00\:00.0/config 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 256 Aug  6 23:28 /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0/config

shows config space is world readable.

Also, I can run lspci -t without a root user.

I quickly tried to remove the check and test - it's not working consistently. But once or twice it did show up a couple of devices!