On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 11:05:29PM +0200, Jesper Blauendahl wrote:
>
> >I have the A7V8X motherboard (with all the extras). Are you using the
> >extended 'APIC' interrupt controller? (I'd guess not from the messages
> >I'm seeing, or more accurately not seeing, in the cut section you gave.)
> >The Via controller on the A7V8X supports APIC, so you may want to turn on
> >'Local APIC support on uniprocessors' and 'IO-APIC support on
> >uniprocessors'
> >in the kernel configuration. This effectively gives you several more
> >interrupts that you can use, and could allow you to avoid this problem.
> >
> >
> I have actually both. Do I need to do any setup to use it? The output of
> dmesg is below.
Hmm. I don't think you need any setup; at least, not in the kernel.
The BIOS should be set to 'Interrupt Mode: APIC' in the Boto Menu. I'm
getting a lot more references to the APIC in the dmesg output than you
are. That may be because I also have ACPI turned on, as the ACPI code
seems to do the first detection of the APIC.
What is in your /proc/interrupts file? That will specify whether
or not the APIC is being used. In my case:
CPU0
0: 41525051 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 127023 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
4: 31554 IO-APIC-edge serial
8: 2 IO-APIC-edge rtc
9: 0 IO-APIC-level acpi
14: 583435 IO-APIC-edge ide0
15: 35095 IO-APIC-edge ide1
16: 24908102 IO-APIC-level sym53c8xx, [EMAIL PROTECTED]:1:0:0
17: 300038 IO-APIC-level tmscsim
18: 4228926 IO-APIC-level eth0
21: 73925 IO-APIC-level ehci-hcd, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, usb-uhci
22: 516465 IO-APIC-level VIA8233
NMI: 0
LOC: 41527513
ERR: 0
MIS: 0
> >It may be more complicated if you dual-boot a lot; I'm unfortunately no
> >expert in how much of this information is kept in the BIOS.
> >
> If you mean several operating systems by dual-boot, I do use dual-boot.
> I have Window XP on the first primary partition and Gentoo on some
> logical partitions. But how can this cause these effects?
As I said, I'm not an expert. (Anybody who is, please feel free to
correct any misunderstandings I have.) The BIOS has what is called the ESCD,
Extended System Configuration Data, which keeps track of a lot of the
current hardware setup. This is what the BIOS uses to assign interrupts
during the early stages of bootup before it starts reading the boot loader
from the disk. Any changes in the hardware will get recorded by the BIOS
into a specific area of memory.
Both Linux and Windows can read this data from the BIOS via either the
older Plug-and-Play specification or the newer ACPI specification. The
two can also ignore the BIOS data and set their own values. If Windows
keeps setting things up the way it likes it, there may be some confusion
whenever you switch back and forth. The BIOS should have 'Plug and Play
OS' set in the boot menu to make sure that the OS can reassign any
settings if it wants to.
In any case, doing 'Reset Configuration Data' from the BIOS Boot Menu
may fix things by clearing out any previously bad ESCD data.
Bryan
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