Argh, Stray interrupts 2006

[Danial Thom]

--- W B Hacker <wbh at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Danial Thom wrote:
> 
> 
> >>
> >>Same as always:
> >>
> >>1) ALT-F2 (3, 4, etc.) before logging in.
> >>
> >>2) Edit /etc/syslog.conf to send soem/all
> >>console messages elsewhere
> >>- after which (1) is no longer necessary.
> >>
> >>Bill
> >>
> > 
> > Thats not really a solution
> 
> - you asked for a 'workaround'.  This is such.

Covering your ears is not a workaround. 

> 
> > 
> > I know I've been told that its a bios
> > configuration problem,
> 
> Actually a MB wiring (PCB trace) or *bridge
> design flaw that a 
> BIOS has to work around.  Used to occur much
> more frequently, 
> and with OS/2 and Slackware as well as 3.X and
> early 4.X *BSD.
> 
>  > however I don't get stray
> > interrupts if I pop a FreeBSD disk on the
> exact
> > same hardware. 
> 
> 
> *BSD added a workaround somewhere around 4.6
> IIRC.
> 
> - Prior to that, one had to either swap MB,
> (*BSD) or set 
> printing to polled, not interrupt-driven
> (OS/2).
> 
> At one time, some MB even had the problem on
> the TTY ports, i.e. 
> - shortly after rebooting from install, the
> console simply 
> streamed IRQ error messages from getty.
> 
> So why is it a misconfiguration in
> > DFLY but not in FreeBSD?
> >
> 
> Probably becasue current drivers no longer use
> a (supposedly) 
> obsolete workaround.
> 
> One would have to inspect the par Port drivers
> with T86 (or some 
> other trace tool) to ID it - then a binary
> patch should be all 
> that it takes to fix it (the drivers involved
> are dirt-simple, 
> about 240 Bytes in FORTH, perhaps 2K in ASM
> source ~ 1K in 
> machine-code) - but I last wrote such for the
> George Morrow 
> Design 'Empire' S-100 I/O board - which used
> the same chips for 
> Serial and parallel later adopted for the IBM
> PC-1, just 
> different base addresses. Same FORTH code ran
> on the PC1 thru 
> AT, (112 Kbps serial when IBM was limited to
> 9.6 or 19.2 Kbps).
> 
> 
> - TRY THIS:
> 
> - enter the BIOS and *disable* the parallel
> port.
> 
> - if no joy, also disable any on-board sound.

There is no parallel port on the machine. A lot
of new motherboards are eliminating it. There is
also no sound card or on-board audio. Its a
server for pete's sake!

> 
> Too often, some idjut has made the support I/O
> inter-dependent, 
> or has such anomalies in the BIOS.
> 
> Nobody seems to work in machine-code anymore,
> and that is the 
> best way to do this low-level stuff w/o
> surprises.
> 
> What MB are you using, and whose name is on the
> bIOS?

Its a Supermicro H8SSL-i. Im not sure of the
bios, the machine is quite far away from me at
the moment.

DT

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