Argh, Stray interrupts 2006
Matthew Dillon
dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Thu Jun 1 10:43:26 PDT 2006
A flood of stray irq 7 messages is typically indicative of a BIOS
SMP configuration problem. It usually means that the PIC is sending
EXT interrupt acknowledgement requests to several cpus at once (or
to one dual-core cpu), and the BIOS hasn't setup the hardware to
properly direct the interrupts to just one cpu pin.
What happens is that one cpu acks the interrupt and clears the pending
bit, then the other cpu tries to ack the no longer pending interrupt
and gets the stray interrupt vector. The stray interrupt vector is
typically an undocumented hardware vector number, usually 7 or 15.
Hence stray irq 7's.
If you are running dual-core cpu's you can try adding this option to
work around the BIOS misconfiguration:
options CPU_AMD64X2_INTR_SPAM
But it may not work on opterons. The problem is most commonly on
systems with DUAL-CORE cpu's and BIOSes that don't quite configure
them properly.
-Matt
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