spurious interrupt with 2.4.10 and higher ?

spurious interrupt with 2.4.10 and higher ?

[Sebastian Roth]

hi all!

For a long time, I receive at boot time (and in /var/log/warn) the following 
message from the kernel:

Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7

Could you tell me please, what is it? My System works fine but I hate this 
message. :-)

Do you need more information?

/proc/cpuinfo says :

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 6
model           : 2
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 701.619
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca 
cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips        : 1399.19

/proc/devices says :

Character devices:
  1 mem
  2 pty
  3 ttyp
  4 ttyS
  5 cua
  7 vcs
 10 misc
 13 input
 14 sound
 29 fb
108 ppp
109 lvm
128 ptm
136 pts
162 raw
180 usb

Block devices:
  1 ramdisk
  2 fd
  3 ide0
  7 loop
  9 md
 22 ide1
 58 lvm

/proc/dma :

 1: SoundBlaster8
 2: floppy
 4: cascade
 5: SoundBlaster16

/proc/interrupt :

           CPU0       
  0:    2825799          XT-PIC  timer
  1:      14178          XT-PIC  keyboard
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  5:    1206018          XT-PIC  soundblaster
  6:         58          XT-PIC  floppy
  8:          2          XT-PIC  rtc
 11:        238          XT-PIC  eth0, usb-uhci, usb-uhci
 12:    1177362          XT-PIC  PS/2 Mouse
 14:     148838          XT-PIC  ide0
 15:     284100          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0 
LOC:    2825758 
ERR:       1550
MIS:          0

information enough?
my actual kernel is 2.4.10 with 2.4.16 I've got the same message..

Thank you and
Bye,
Sebastian

Re: spurious interrupt with 2.4.10 and higher ?

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Sebastian Roth wrote:

> hi all!
> 
> For a long time, I receive at boot time (and in /var/log/warn) the following 
> message from the kernel:
> 
> Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7
> 
> Could you tell me please, what is it? My System works fine but I hate this 
> message. :-)

I don't have your version of source here at the moment. If it was
2.4.1, you just comment out line 321 of ../linux/arch/i386/kernel/i8259.c
and re-compile, re-install. That gets rid of the message.

FYI, unless you get a burst of these things, they are harmless.


Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (799.53 BogoMips).

    I was going to compile a list of innovations that could be
    attributed to Microsoft. Once I realized that Ctrl-Alt-Del
    was handled in the BIOS, I found that there aren't any.

Re: spurious interrupt with 2.4.10 and higher ?

[Petr Vandrovec]

On  6 Dec 01 at 15:43, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > For a long time, I receive at boot time (and in /var/log/warn) the following 
> > message from the kernel:
> > 
> > Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7
> > 
> > Could you tell me please, what is it? My System works fine but I hate this 
> > message. :-)
> 
> FYI, unless you get a burst of these things, they are harmless.

Only problem is that this message is printed only once for each IRQ, so
you cannot get more than 16 of them... Watch ERR counter in /proc/interrupts,
it is still increasing, although message is not printed. On my A7V (KT133,
Thunderbird) there are about 3 spurious IRQ7 per 1000 irqs delivered from
onboard Promise IDE (and ide driver does not complain about timeouts, so
I assume that IRQ from IDE is delivered AND spurious IRQ7 is delivered). 
Unfortunately I do not have anything else in the computer, so I cannot 
check whether KT133 or Promise is a culprit, but from other messages it 
looks like that Promise is innocent, and VIA is guilty one.
                                            Best regards,
                                                Petr Vandrovec
                                                vandrove@vc.cvut.cz