On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Andrew Morton wrote: > "Dr. Michael Weller" wrote: > > > > Dear list, > > > > I run a Compaq Proliant 1500 (dual Pentium 75.200) with hardware raid > > (Smart2) with two ethernet cards 3com905 (b or c, I can't tell you right > > now) as a firewall and web/mail virus scanner which (needless to say) > > needs to be up 7d/24h. They are two 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx cards, btw. > > Oct 9 17:29:02 fwintern kernel: eth0: Interrupt posted but not > > delivered -- IRQ blocked by another device? > > This is the infamous APIC bug. I have about ten reports of this over a > four-month period. Mark Hemment mentioned it just yesterday. Ok. > Donald Becker says that this is a software bug (I don't know why he > thinks this). He says that he _always_ boots linux with the `noapic' > option to prevent it happening. Question: I thought the APIC was very important for SMP and SMP performance. Would the machine still work as SMP with noapic (well, I can just try, I know). > > The problem was reproducible (several times) with the same download (a > > 300MB file) after a reboot. > > Interesting. So you had a stable 2.2.14 machine which suddenly started > repeatedly exhibiting this problem? Is it still reproducible? Yes, No. In more detail: The machine is a firewall/virus scanner for a company network. It worked 100% reliably, however a 300MB iso image download triggered the problem repeatedly. Right now I cannot reproduce the problem anymore. However, it seems bandwuitdh to the internet is currently a bit slower. You said it's related to the IRQ frequency. The machine serves a 2Mbit internet link only. I'd guess its normally not stressed enough. Except with this long relatively fast (~1.5Mbit when it crashed) download. Michael. -- Michael Weller: eowmob@exp-math.uni-essen.de, eowmob@ms.exp-math.uni-essen.de, or even mat42b@spi.power.uni-essen.de. If you encounter an eowmob account on any machine in the net, it's very likely it's me. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
