spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7

schatoor · 10-23-2003, 05:26 PM

Hi, scrolling through the output of "dmesg", I find a line "spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7"
What does that mean? My mechine doesn't experience any problems because of it, atleast not that i'm aware of, but googling on this message indicates it might be something I will have to get fixed.
Another indication that things are not quite as they should be, is this comment in the kernel source:

Quote:

Note that IRQ7 and IRQ15 (the two spurious IRQs
usually resulting from the 8259A-1|2 PICs) occur
even if the IRQ is masked in the 8259A. Thus we
can check spurious 8259A IRQs without doing the
quite slow i8259A_irq_real() call for every IRQ.
This does not cover 100% of spurious interrupts,
but should be enough to warn the user that there
is something bad going on ...

I got that from "/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/i8259.c"

My hardware profile:

CPU: AMD atlon 900 MHz
mobo: asus (don't know exact specs, but uses the via chipset series)
mem: 384 MB DDR ram
hd: 60 gb seagate
video: nVidia gforce 4 440 mx
sound: als4000
nic: sitcom fast ethernet, uses tulip chipset

Can someone give me more info on this?

Faecal · 10-25-2003, 10:02 AM

I've experienced these warnings for a long time. As far as I know, there's nothing whatever to be worried about. Hassle the maintainer of whatever part of the kernel if you're really desperate to resolve it. Probably just some bug in the motherboard: mines an Asus A7V333.