Hi, I have an old ISA-PNP soundcard whose driver doesn't currently use the ISA-PNP services. I have therefore been activating this card by writing to the /proc/isapnp interface. And in an idle moment, I tried an "auto" instruction: cat > /proc/isapnp << EOF card 0 ENS3081 dev 0 ENS0000 auto EOF This operation didn't return and system CPU usage then climbed to 100%, although the box didn't lock up. Further investigations showed that the problem happened when either the isapnp_config_activate() or isapnp_config_deactivate() functions tried to acquire the isapnp_cfg_mutex. This seemed to be because they tried to acquire the mutex for the specific devfn (zero in this case), but the isapnp_set_card() function has already acquired it using -1 instead. Couldn't the isapnp_autoconfigure() function use isapnp_activate() and isapnp_deactivate() instead of isapnp_info_device->activate() and isapnp_info_device->deactivate()? The former don't try to acquire the mutex, and are precisely what the "activate" and "deactivate" /proc commands invoke anyway. Cheers, Chris This is the output from /proc/isapnp: Card 1 'ENS3081:ENSONIQ Soundscape' PnP version 1.0 Logical device 0 'ENS0000:Unknown' Device is not active Active port 0x330,0x300 Active IRQ 5 [0x2],9 [0x2] Active DMA 1,3 Resources 0 Priority preferred Port 0x330-0x330, align 0xf, size 0x10, 16-bit address decoding IRQ 5,7 High-Edge IRQ 2/9 High-Edge DMA 1 8-bit byte-count compatible DMA 0,3 8-bit byte-count compatible Alternate resources 0:1 Priority acceptable Port 0x330-0x330, align 0xf, size 0x10, 16-bit address decoding IRQ 5,7,2/9 High-Edge IRQ 7,2/9,10 High-Edge DMA 1,3 8-bit byte-count compatible DMA 0,3 8-bit byte-count compatible Alternate resources 0:2 Priority functional Port 0x330-0x330, align 0xf, size 0x10, 16-bit address decoding IRQ 5,7,2/9 High-Edge IRQ 7,2/9,10 High-Edge DMA 0,1,3 8-bit byte-count compatible Alternate resources 0:3 Priority functional Port 0x350-0x350, align 0xf, size 0x10, 16-bit address decoding IRQ 5,7,2/9 High-Edge IRQ 7,2/9,10 High-Edge DMA 0,1,3 8-bit byte-count compatible - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/