Irq Troubles

From openSUSE

Dealing With Interrupt / Irq Problems

On some systems, various hardware configuration and initialization problems may arise. These often stem from issues which relate to interrupts. Think PnP.

These issues can be a pain to resolve, but there are means to help you.

Bios

Modern bios' are complex. That is logical since modern motherboards are complex. A common of the shelve motherboard can house dual nics, multiple (S)ATA controllers, sound, firewire, USB, some legacy ports, video controllers. etc.

Update your Bios

This may sound like an open door, and it is! When there is an update available, install it.

Enable On Board Hardware

This may sound silly, but one of the major issues the initial author of this article had, was caused by disabled hardware!

Users had problems where hardware could not be used / configured. Console/dmesg messages during boot (also in the boot log) look like this:

kernel: irq 10: nobody cared! 
kernel: [<c0134fdc>] __report_bad_irq+0x1c/0x70

This goes on for a bit and then ends with:

kernel: Disabling IRQ #10

Making any device that has this interrupt useless

This has been observed for people who disabled the following:

• The irq assignment for VGA.
• On board SATA controllers, since they have no SATA disks.

Maybe more are possible. It is not yet clear if this is chipset related.

Boot Parameters

There are also boot/kernel parameters which can disable or change some smartness used to initialize devices. The SUSE Support Database has a page with relevant kernel parameters and more information. http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/10/81_acpi.html