[Techtalk] Who Knows IRQ

[mc]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 09:18, Andrew wrote:
> Hi People,
> 
> 	Just a quick question or three about IRQ.
> 
> 	What is it?
> 	Should *four* ON-board devices have the same IRQ? IRQ11,= 
> ethernet,usb,usb, multimedia.

IRQ is an Interrupt ReQuest line.  Basically, you used to only have one
device on each one, and that was its main way to talk to the CPU.  If
your machine had lots of devices, you ended up in IRQ hell, where
devices all wanted the same IRQ and some would not work.

By no means a hardware expert, but friends who are tell me that modern
machines have "PCI steering" so they can handle a bunch of devices on
one IRQ.  Of course, these folks only run Varieties of Windows, so I do
not know for sure if that carries over to the Linux world :)


-- 
mc
I haven't lost my mind,
It is backed up on disk somewhere.
http://mcgonzalez.home.att.net