[Techtalk] Who Knows IRQ
coldfire
rolick571 at duq.edu
Wed Aug 21 01:54:39 EST 2002
> > 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 :)
i'd just like to add .. that back in the days when windows 98 existed on
my machine, i had a scsi card and network card that always fought for the
same irq. sometimes the network wouldn't work, other times i couldn't
access my cdr drive. hell, sometimes it wouldn't boot. but in linux,
everything always worked fine .. if there were performance issues, i
couldn't say. never noticed horrible performance so i never worried about
checking. :)
coldie
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