My CD reader is attached to an SCSI controller. The controller (a Symbios 53c875) happens to use the same IRQ 9 than my ethernet card. Both devices are PCI. When I try to install there is amessage telling there is an IRQ conflict and from then installation goes so slowly to be completely unusable: itr takes over five minutes to get a shell prompt in console 2. Box is a K6/2 450 with 128 megs of RAM. I installed through a disk install (disk is IDE) and the production kernel does not have problems with both devices using the same IRQ.
Which ethernet card and driver?
NE2000 PCI clone. Driver is NE2K PCI. But the problem is not in the driver. The problem is in PCI-related code. The kernel in kerrnel-BOOT (ie the one used for installation) does not know how to handle peripherals using the same IRQ. cat /proc/pci shows that the SCSI controller has been identified as master capable and the ethernet as not master capable (both correct) but kernel is not able to handle IRQ sharing. The regular production kernel (kernel-i586 RPM) has no problem sharing IRQs.
Could you please type the *exact* message you get telling you about the IRQ conflict? That way we can look for it.
<4> IRQ 9 Routing conflict in PIRQ table device 00:07:2
The closest I can find is "IRQ routing conflict in pirq table for device..." Ingo, can you shed any light on this?
does this still happen if you use the vanilla 2.4.3 kernel? There were some fixes in this area. The pirq routing conflict is not necesserily a unrecoverable problem, but it's indeed a sign of BIOS wackiness in the PCI area.
Could be a BIOS problem but it works with the normal (ie not install kernel). I think the Wolverine kernel had not the "Enable IRQ sharing" compil falg enabled while the production kernel had it enabled