[tulip] help forcing tulip onto given irq

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Ari Jort wrote:

> I have a Tulip card from Kingston in an Intel L440GX board
> and the nic keeps coming up on the same irq as the onboard
> scsi controller.
> 
> I've tried the usual ways of politely coaxing the card
> onto another irq, but it persists in its refusal.

A PCI card+driver cannot change the IRQ that it is assigned by the BIOS.

Read
 http://www.scyld.com/expert/irq-conflict.html

It also explains the bug in the SCSI driver that prevents sharing interrupts.

> With a modular kernel, I've tried using irq=18 as parameter
> for insmod tulip.  That's not an implemented parameter, it seems.
> There is no load-time option on that driver to allow for setting 
> the irq, I think.  Is that true?

Correct.  Only the motherboard BIOS knows how to configure the IRQ line.

> On which cards/drivers is setting the irq with ifconfig supported?

Generally only with ISA cards. And usually only ISA cards developed in the
early to mid 1990s.  The only more recent ISA cards are NE2000 clones, and
they set the IRQ line with an EEPROM setting or ISA-PnP.

ISA is dead, with only sound cards and PCMCIA adapters (which need the IRQs)
still being viable products vs. PCI.  I believe that the only currently
produced product that the "irq=..." option applies to is the ISA 3c509.


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Beowulf-II Cluster Distribution
Annapolis MD 21403