[rescue] Some days ....

vance at neurotica.com vance at neurotica.com
Tue Jun 17 19:20:42 CDT 2003


On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> > I've also had an issue with motherboard with lots of built in goodies
> > consuming so many IRQ resources that adding hardware was easiest by
> > disabling onboard devices that I didn't need (second com port).
>
> Yup.  Older IBM Thinkpads were particularly bad about this ...  they
> shipped with so many integrated peripherals, and a BIOS so anal about
> interrupt sharing, that it was impossible to simultaneously enable all
> of them at once.
>
> (To make matters worse, the application that configured the BIOS was a
> Windows app, so if the BIOS settings got hosed and the machine wouldn't
> boot, you were SOL.)

I think you might mean second-generation Thinkpads.  The first-generation
Thinkpads were Microchannel machines with level-triggered interrupts.
They supported *many* devices sharing an interrupt channel.

Peace...  Sridhar



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