At 08:47 AM 9/20/02 +1000, you wrote: >Actually Linux does use irqs higher than 15. >i've only ever seen it on smp boxes though. That's funny you should mention SMP boxes. This machine of mine is an SMP-capable machine, but it only has one CPU. I sort of wonder if extra IRQ numbers are a part of the SMP spec? Whatever the case, it effectively lets me have more cards under Linux than is possible under Windows. I've got 4 PCI cards and 2 ISA cards. They consist of a Dectalk PC which gets used under Windows, a Soundblaster AWE64, an Adaptec PCI SCSI card for my scanner, a Smartlink Modem that uses the Topic chipset making it usable in Linux, and my Linksys ethernet card. I saw some settings in Windows to use PCI 2.1 extensions and stuff about IRQ steering, and will look into this, but I sort of doubt I'll come up with much there. As you can see, my system is just full of hardware. More than likely, I'll eventually get a new computer and turn this old one into a strictly Linux box and probably the new computer will be dual boot between some version of Windows and Linux.
