On Mon Aug 17 1998, Harold Sinclair wrote:
> I have an 8 month old Award BIOS. PnP Operating system is enabled in the
> BIOS, and here's how it handles the 3COM 905TX [it works!] :
I have two of these (pci) cards in my own box (not a forwarding router, but
for direct access into two subnets).
> loading device 'eth0'...
> eth0: 3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx at 0x6500, 00:10:4b:32:85:46, IRQ 10
...
> This card wants to go to irq10 on every machine I've seen it on (lots),
> though I'm not sure about that memory address. I am not sure that you have
> to disable PnP Operating system in the BIOS.
If it works, then what's the problem? :) IRQ10 is fine - unless something
else also wants that IRQ. An IRQ isn't a memory address, btw, are you
confusing this with the I/O port address? To see what IRQs and I/O ports
linux is using for each device, do:
% cat /proc/interrupts /proc/ioports
This normally shouldn't be an issue. But IRQ allocation can become a
problem, as I found out. The 2.0.x kernels aren't pnp-aware (although I'm
told that 2.1.x is, I don't know for sure).
After giving the kernel two ether= bootup parameters to get both cards
recognised, they persistently occupied irq10 and irq11, no problems. I then added a
third card (3c509/isa), and doing that reversed the order of how the IRQs
were allocated, and the 3c509 got irq10 with the other two at irq11 and 12.
Weird... it meant shuffling the cables around but everything still worked.
Then I put in a scsi card that could only take IRQs 10-12. One of the
3c905 cards got put back to IRQ9, but the scsi card refused to work. And it
also stuffed up by sound card for some unknown reason (probably
conflicting with the OPL irq or DMA).
After trying all sorts of things, I eventually resorted to setting the IRQs
for each slot manually in the BIOS, and now I have everything happily
working together.
I guess if I had played around with isapnptools with the bios set as
"pnp-aware OS", I could have got it all going that way.
Cheers .
Tony __________ Tony Nugent >> - Linux - << _--_|\
/ / / / __/ __ \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> UNIX power << / *\
/ /_/ /\ \/ /_/ / [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> on a pc! << \_.--._/
\____/___/\___\_\ UNIX Systems Officer, Faculty of Science v
University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Oueensland Australia
