APIC on AMD Athlon 2500+ Broken?

[Tim Writer]

lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org (Lennart Sorensen) writes:

> On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 03:02:56PM -0400, Tim Writer wrote:
> > The BIOS documentation for my home system (single CPU Gigabyte P4) states
> > that the BIOS and OS APIC settings must match.  IOW, either APIC is disabled
> > in the BIOS _and_ in the OS or it's enabled in the BIOS _and_ enabled in the
> > OS.
> > 
> > In my experience, APIC can be a big deal for single CPU systems.  For
> > example, the on-board Promise RAID controller (which I use as additional IDE
> > channels) on my home system conflicts with USB unless APIC is enabled in the
> > BIOS and kernel.  Without APIC, I'm unable to use the RAID controller at all.
> 
> If a PCI device can't share an interrupt, the device or its driver is
> broken.

Agreed but knowing that a device or its driver is broken doesn't go very far
towards solving the problem.  Enabling APIC is a viable workaround.

> I have run a system with usb, adaptec 2940uw, pci video card and 3c905
> NIC all on a single IRQ without problems.

I'm sure many of us have.  I'm equally sure many of us have had problems with
such a system.  In an ideal world, we'd all be running Linux on high quality,
reasonably priced hardware.  Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world.
The state of PC hardware is such that even if you take a great deal of care
in picking your components (and I did), you can still run into problems.

> Of course I also don't want to use Promise's proprietary software raid
> ever.

I'm not using their software RAID.  I'm using their on-board RAID controller
as ide2 and ide3, that's all.

You seem to have completely missed the point of my post which was simply to
illustrate that APIC _can_ be useful for single CPU systems.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
905.771.0017 ext. 225                           thornhill, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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