NCR53C815 vs Tulip: sharing IRQ fails

[jlewis@lewis.org]

On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Hardware Stuff wrote:

> I have a system that's not short on IRQs, but in which the BIOS
> insists on giving the DTC 3130B NCR53C815 and the D-Link DFE500-Tx
> 21040 the same IRQ.  The NCR53C815 reports obtaining a shared IRQ and
> functions fine, while it's impossible to ifconfig the Tulip.  It's an
> i386 2.0.36 kernel with the latest patches for the NCR.
> 
> I'm be happy if I could force either card to a different IRQ, but
> nothing has worked yet.  Has anyone had this setup working?

I was in a similar situation a while back and hacked the tulip driver to
request its IRQ with the same flags as the NCR driver.  Have a look at the
de4x5 driver to see what to hack.  Look at the request_irq parts.

> Suggestions?

Buy a non-brain-damaged motherboard.  By hacking the tulip driver, you can
make the system function, but you won't likely see great performance from
the network card.  I never saw much more than 1MB/s even though the card
was running 100MB/s FD.

There was talk of this IRQ sharing problem getting fixed, but I don't know
if it happened in the 2.2 kernels.  I don't think it did, but I haven't
used them and no longer work at the place with the bad boards.

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