Tom's Hardware notes of the Supermicro P6DBS mother board:
board shows interesting phenomenon. WinBIOS would not let you disable
USB properly, which grabs IRQ9. To use this IRQ you have to plug the
PCI card into PCI Slot 4 (the one next to the AGP Slot), PCI Slots 1
and 2 will only get IRQ11, which is already used by AGP VGA and it
leads to crashes with several AGP cards if this IRQ is shared. Hence
the network card needs to be plugged into PCI 4 to get the last free
IRQ (IRQ9), whilst the onboard SCSI adapter always grabs IRQ10,
otherwise the system will not run with e.g. a RIVA card. To make this
all work you will have to disable the USB manually in the Windows 95
system manager. This board shows a very inflexible way of distributing
IRQs over the 4 PCI slots, which cannot be improved by any BIOS
setting. If you are using an AGP card and need the EIDE ports as well
as both COM ports and the printer port, you can *only* use PCI Slot 4
for *one* card that needs its own IRQ.
My impression is that for Linux, the BIOS is essentially irrelevant,
and Linux will do whatever it wants. But reading the above, its not
totally clear to me that this is true.
Can anyone explain if it matters ?
--p
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