Too many requests for irq 11 (IRQs and APIC)
Distribution: SUSE 10.0
Hardware Environment: P4M UP-256MB RAM-ALI motherboard with lapic disabled in BIOS-Linux installed on external Maxtor drive connected thru' USB (Laptop - BenQ Joybook 3000 (DH3000))
Software Environment: SUSE Linux 10.0 2.6.13-15
Problem Description: My console gets flooded by message - "Too many requests for irq 11". Obviously, because several devices are using the same irq 11 !! To list out - Graphics card NVidia Geforce4, Sound card Realtek AC'97, USB Mouse, USB Storage (Maxtor 300GB drive on which linux resides), Modem PCTel HSP 56MR and IEEE 1394 firewire !! It definitely is affecting the performance of hardware, cause sometimes the mouse and keyboard do not respond and I can see my Maxtor drive working real hard.
I tried to work around by passing lapic command line option for which I get the following output-
Local APIC disabled by BIOS - You can enable it by "lapic"
I have compiled a kernel with local apic support enabled along with all the necessary options besides enabling ACPI and disabling APM. Yet, I get the same message output on my monitor. When passed the kernel parameter "lapic", it hangs and don't respond to ctrl+alt+del and have to powerdown using the poweroff button. With "lapic" option, kernel dumps a screenful of text like scanning PCI bridge, CPU etc. The last line I see is "PCI: Using configuration 1, PCI base address xxxxxxx". After that it's eternal silence.
How can I force enable Local APIC to resolve this IRQ sharing problem ?
PS: My BIOS has no option available to configure APIC !!
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