Fixed IRQ problem with Netgear FA310TX

Jon Lewis jlewis@inorganic5.fdt.net
Sat Nov 21 03:50:03 1998


On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Erik H. Beck wrote:

> Unfortunately, the bios on the machine I am using (Dell Dimension XPS
> P75, build February 1994) insists on putting all PCI devices on IRQ
> 10.  So I decided the easiest way to fix the problem was to replace
> the PCI ethernet card with an ISA card.  I now have a 3Com 3c509b card

> driver for this card as well as the tulip cards. Thanks also to the
> folks who wrote me and let me know that PCI IRQ sharing really isn't a
> good idea under Linux.

Why isn't it?  My impression from what I've read on linux-kernel is that
Linux does a poor job of PCI IRQ sharing, and that it's expected to clean
up its act sometime in 2.1 or 2.3.

For now, if you're brave, you can make the system work.  If you look at
the de4x5 driver, you'll see it will share the IRQ with a SCSI card if it
has to.  I've hacked the tulip driver in a similar way, and it hasn't
blown up yet.

----don't waste your cpu, crack rc5...www.distributed.net team enzo---
 Jon Lewis <jlewis@fdt.net>  |  Spammers will be winnuked or 
 Network Administrator       |  nestea'd...whatever it takes
 Florida Digital Turnpike    |  to get the job done.
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