One thing it does help with is to identify a situation where an interrupt
is occurring but no installed drivers are responding to it. Buggy hardware
or a buggy driver causing interrupts other than ones it's handling to
occur can result in this sort of thing. If a PCI interrupt is triggering
continuously and nobody is handling it (though somebody has an interrupt
handler installed) it is sometimes nice to let the system know.
That interrupt could be temporarily masked, warnings could be injected
into logs, etc.
Brian
-- Brian Swetland | Kernel Engineer | "Home is where the dot files are." swetland@be.com | Be Incorporated | -- Keith Garner- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/