Spurious interrupt
 

Hi all!

I'm quite new to the linux environment so I feel I have to ask for this one ^_^
since I installed the os (Debian - sarge, kernel 2.4.25) I'm getting this message at random intervals:

Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ 7

a cat /proc/interrupts (I hope it's the right way to get the IRQ - device list) reaveals there is nothing on 7

what can be the cause of this?

just to add some more details, I had some hardware problems with the same HW setup in WinXP: when I installed my IteX ADSL PCI NIC card it was on a pci slot with the same irq of the integrated ethernet card (Asustek/Broadcom 4401 on a Asus A7V8X mobo) it completely hung the system every time I rebooted. then I moved it on another pci slot and everything went smoonth, but sometimes after a system crash or something win still hangs (cannot tell about linux eheh :P)
maybe it's somewhat related..

Don't worry about it, offhand I have no idea what it is, but I've seen it myself on 3 different machines (oddly enough all Athlon boxen), over about the past 3 years at random times, usually shortly after boot. The only time you need to sweat a spurious interrupt report in dmesg is when you see a few thousand of them and the machine crashes.

Offhand I think its a benign motherboard quirk no one has bothered to work around.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok, tnx!