[vox-tech] Force-setting IRQ of a PCI device

Mark K. Kim vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
Sat, 17 Jan 2004 19:32:46 -0800 (PST)


While at the IF, we had a system that wouldn't recognize the IRQ of the
cardbus "controller."  (And, as a consequence, Linux set its IRQ to IRQ
0.)  We were trying to get a wireless NIC working, but the modules
(y-something module and all other modules that depend on it) wouldn't
load.  The error message was:

   PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:0a.0. Please try
   using pci=biosirq.

or something like that.  The obvious solution was to assign an IRQ to the
PCI device from the BIOS, but the BIOS was a bare-bone BIOS that had no
PCI options at all.  We tried passing pci=biosirq to the kernel at boot
but that just froze the system during PCI discovery.

So we were thinking -- We can get a newer BIOS that knows PCI, which we
couldn't find any.  Another option was to force-assign an IRQ to the PCI
device (by its device ID) but nobody knew how to do it.  Some web-browsing
shows that ACPI has some PCI IRQ rerouting thing happening but I can't
find any more information about what that is or how to use it.

Sooooooooo...  Does anyone know how to force-assign an IRQ to PCI devices?
Would that even work?

Thanks in adv!

-Mark

PS: The Installfest went as usual (mostly working except certain
hardware,) except for one system that came in with a wireless NIC that
nobody could get to work.  (This is a different system than the one I'm
discussing above.)

-- 
Mark K. Kim
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