I'm having a problem with kernel 2.4.2-SMP on my HP Vectra XU 5/90. This is
an old dual-pentium (Neptune chipset) machine.
The machine has an on-board SCSI and ethernet controller, and I have added a
Netgear FA310TX card. Due to the "unique" design of the motherboard, all the
PCI slots share an interrupt with the SCSI controller.
I have narrowed the problem down to the fact that the kernel is assigning
the PCI devices edge-triggered interrupts (IO-APIC-edge) instead of level
(IO-APIC-level). This causes the SCSI controller to hang if there is any
network activity during disk activity.
The machine identifies itself as an MPC type #5 machine (ISA/PCI), but it
seems to have EISA-style ELCR configuration information. If I hack mpparse.c
to force my machine type to #6 (EISA), the PCI interrupts are correctly
identified as level triggered.
Could someone please help me develop a correct workaround for this problem?
I have been thinking about the following options:
If there is no MP-table interrupt configuration information for an ISA/PCI
system, try falling back to ELCR information before giving up and using a
standard "ISA" scheme? It seems that HP may have done this on several of
their early SMP systems.
OR
If PCI interrupts are shared, force them to be level triggered? Can shared
PCI interrupts be edge triggered? If not, then wouldn't this be the correct
solution? This isn't specific to the Vectra, but could possibly prevent
problems on any machine with a broken BIOS?
"/proc/interrupts" on the hacked kernel looks like:
CPU0 CPU1
0: 411243 337583 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 1095 1260 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
4: 603 116 IO-APIC-edge serial
5: 21400 20657 IO-APIC-edge soundblaster
8: 0 2 IO-APIC-edge rtc
9: 3398 3158 IO-APIC-level PCnet/PCI 79C970
10: 504852 505145 IO-APIC-level tmscsim, eth1
NMI: 749766 749768
LOC: 748736 748797
ERR: 0
I can post the dmesg output, if that would help.
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