From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:24:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:24:27 -0400 Received: from adsl-66-121-5-226.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net ([66.121.5.226]:37959 "HELO switchmanagement.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:24:15 -0400 Message-ID: <3BB10424.9070007@switchmanagement.com> Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 15:24:36 -0700 From: Brian Strand Organization: Switch Management User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010913 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Bonds, Deanna" CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 3c59x + dpti2o problem with interrupt sharing? In-Reply-To: <50DB155AD0CED411988E009027D61DB324D507@otcexc01.otc.adaptec.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Bonds, Deanna wrote: >>A related question is: should these drivers be able to share >>IRQs, i.e. >>is it a worthwhile goal to have them operate reliably while sharing >>IRQs, or is IRQ-sharing a performance loss and something to >>be avoided? >> > >The Adaptec card can share interrupts, but it is not wise to do that with >another card that is going to be a high priority interrupt. You most likely >need to change the motherboard bios settings. If you are not using your >onboard IDE you can disable that freeing up another high priority interrupt. >Otherwise you can manually assign the interrupts through the bios > I disabled onboard IDE (secondary channel; primary is needed for CDROM), serial, parallel, scsi, usb, and one of two onboard NICs, and now I am in a situation with no IRQ sharing. Unfortunately this BIOS (Phoenix ServerBIOS 2 Rel 6.0, Tyan Thunder K7 BIOS v2.07a) does not allow me to assign IRQs to PCI slots, and I cannot move the RAID card around because it is in a 2U riser card. Hopefully this will solve the problem. On a broader note, where is the cause of this problem? You indicated that the Adaptec card can share interrupts, so was the problem the 3com driver, the 3com hardware, the motherboard, or some other portion of the kernel? It seems that given the scarcity of interrupts, this situation probably happens a lot, so we should handle it gracefully (meaning that I should go investigate the 3c59x and dpti2o drivers some more if it is a problem which is solvable in software). Thanks, Brian Strand