hopefully solved (was: 2.4.17 freezes)

[Robin Farine <robin.farine@acn-group.ch>]

Hi, 

On February, I reported some problems with my office PCs running 2.4.17.
I tried 2.4.18 with the PC on my desk and observed the same problem.
But, comparing interrupts mapping with the machines running 2.2.20, I
noticed that my machine (2.4.18) mapped the Ethernet NICs interrupts to
interrupt 9, a high priority vector also shared by ACPI and USB, instead
of 10 like the other PCs (2.2.20).

>From the BIOS setup, I forced the PCI slot with the NIC to use interrupt
7 (low priority) and since then my machine runs without problem.

Since these 3 PCs have DEC chips based NICs, I suspect a possible
problem with the tulip driver, something like a status bit not cleared
before re-enabling the chip's interrupt, which only results into a
catastrophic situation when the associated interrupt vector has a very
high priority (4)? However, these are just speculations and I don't have
the knowledge required to quickly verify them.

Robin

P.S. I'm not subscribed to the lkml ...