Spurious 8259a Interrupt: IRQ7

walterbyrd · 01-05-2006, 11:20 AM

Can anybody tell me what this is? Why do I get it? What does it mean? Is it serious? And how do I get rid of it?

I have an AMD 1000mhz, and an AMD 1600+, both run debian 3.1ra stable. I have NVidia graphics cards in both.

mknirsch · 01-05-2006, 11:38 AM

Hi,

the 8259 ias a PIC (Programmable interrupt controller from Intel,
In order to provide a sufficient number of irq's normally two of
this PIC's are connected in series with irq2 of the first PIC as
the cascase IRQ. Each time the Pic receives a IRQ request it fires
IRQ 7 in your case - signaling the CPU that there is some wor to do.
Depending on the IRQ number now different taskc can be processed .

Martin

walterbyrd · 01-06-2006, 08:33 AM

So why is linux alerting me to this? Is it a problem? How do I stop it?

I thought IRQ 2 cascaded to IRQ 9?