BP6 noapic

From: Zdenek Kabelac (kabi@fi.muni.cz)
Date: Tue Feb 08 2000 - 10:32:42 EST


Hi

After a discusion with Tony Hoyle I've tried to add option "noapic"
as a kernel parameter.

This had major efect on the stability of my system.

With this option all my problems with "hda: lost interrupt" messages
or the simillar ones with ethernet device had disappeared.

So I think most of BP6 user who have some kind of these problems should
try to use this kernel boot option.

Also Ingo you should be an expert for the APIC code -
Are you sure everything is correct for dual celeron systems in the Apic
architecture?

During my boot process I could see a lot of remaping interrupts code
during
the normal kernel startup. Also I know there are some error message
arriving on 2.3.XX series.

But isn't there some deadlock situation which could cause
that unexpected interrupt might cause complete deadlock of interrupt
system?
(As e.g. without this noapic option I could lock my linux via this
process:
 - boot SMP kernel with option nosmp and use hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda
while : ; do hdparm -t /dev/hda ; done - this leads to these two
situations:
I start to recieve hda: lost interrupt message (especially
if there is some activity on the ethernet device).
Or I could completely lose control of my keyboard (no reaction on SysRq)
when I try to break this loop - it usualy takes some time
to achive this (upto 5 minutes) but I was able to reapeat this several
time succesfully. Also some latest 2.2.15preX kernels are slightly
better
here I'm still able to lock my SMP linux box. (The problem
is also far more visible when I try to use RTLinux from www.rtlinux.org
-
but noapic seems to stabilize things even here)

bye

-- 
  Zdenek Kabelac  http://i.am/kabi/ kabi@i.am {debian.org; fi.muni.cz}

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