Problem with NOTICE Sdsk and Spurious Interrupts revisited
Brian
DEC Prioris HX PII 333
Equinox SST PCI Multiport Board
Mylex RAID Controller P/PD
Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI Controller
3COM 3C905B 10/100 NIC
OS5.0.4 with the following updates
oss449F
oss469a
rs504c
oss601a
I put a message about this on Monday about the server halting without any
warnings or Panics with a Message NOTICE: Sdsk.
Tom Parsons told me to check all SCSI cables to make sure that they were
properly terminated and correctly connected. I made sure that all SCSI
cable were properly connected (nice and tight) and that all terminators were
in the proper place. I also check the
BIOS to make sure that it was the same as before but unfortunately I was
unable to see the previous settings since I could not find the configuration
diskette for the server when I had to upgrade the BIOS.
When I called DEC, they mentioned some settings that I can turn off (I know
this is vague), like locking IRQ's to pci slots and shutting off all
shadowed RAM.
If anybody has any other suggestions that may help, I would greatly
appreciate it. If anyone needs any more information, I will be HAPPY to
provide it.
Also, I have been looking all over the net to try to discover exactly what
Spurious Interrupts means and what they are but I am having a hard time
grasping the concept. Could someone please explain what these are and/or
how to tell what interrupts are currently being used on the system at any
given time.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Tony Lawrence
>
> Also, I have been looking all over the net to try to discover exactly what
> Spurious Interrupts means and what they are but I am having a hard time
> grasping the concept. Could someone please explain what these are and/or
> how to tell what interrupts are currently being used on the system at any
> given time.
A spurious interrupt is an interrupt the driver didn't
expect.
Briefly, devices such as disks, parallel ports, serial
ports, etc. use interrupts to signal back to the cpu that
they have completed the last task you gave them. The
rationale behind this is that devides are very slow; you can
hand them data, and there is room for thousands or even
millions of other cpu instructions to be done before that
device is ready to handle more data. Interrupts can also
signal a need for attention: a serial port recieving
characters sends interrupts letting the driver know that new
data has arrived.
So a spurious interrupt is unexpected. You didn't give the
damn thing any data, so why is it tapping you on the
shoulder looking for attention? You could also have the
case of an interrupt on a line that isn't configured at all:
say the kernel hasn't been told of any device using
interrupt 11, but whoops, there it is. That generates a
different message, though.
See http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/devices.html and
http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/driverart.html for more
information.
--
Tony Lawrence (to...@aplawrence.com)
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