I don't know what you specifically mean by a driver locking up PCI (and we've moved on to PCIe now), but I suspect the general category of (1) is largely addres

I don't know what you specifically mean by a driver locking up PCI (and we've moved on to PCIe now), but I suspect the general category of (1) is largely addressed by the io virtualization facilities and RAS features that have recently come to amd64 hardware. That stuff has existed on big iron hardware since times immemorial.