Are the IRQ's assigned by the BIOS, or by the OS? I've come to the conclusion that my inability to get my pcmcia wireless to work consistently is because of an IRQ conflict. Somehow, the hda dma and the wireless card card competing for one IRQ... Is there a way to assign an IRQ?

I'm using an M700 compaq laptop with Slack 10 (2.6.8.1), and a Lucent Wavelan IEEE card - I've tried an Orinoco Gold card too, with the same system-freeze during boot:

During boot, the process is fine until the cardmgr starts watching 2 sockets.... then, sometimes, it works... most often the hard drive light stays on and the system locks - nothing moves. The dma conflict in action, I suppose...

I believe disabling the pnp os option in the bios lets the bios assign irq's, and if the pnp os option is enabled then the os assigns irq's. I think that's how it works.
good luck.

Hi,

Are you sure that come from an IRQ conflict??? 'cause most of the time, problems encountered with PCMCIA are due to a driver misconfiguration (for example an option to add for your specific hardware...). For more info about howto to solve PCMCIA problems, see the PCMCIA howto It has always solved my PCMCIA problems

Oliv'

Thanks for the replies... I'll try disabling pnp in the bios and see what happens.

The last time I tried it and the computer locked on boot, there was a long list of errors - the last of which was a message about fatal irq problem, or something of the sort...

Where's the pcmcia howto?

at the same place that all Linux Howto: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html

Oliv'