hopefully solved (was: 2.4.17 freezes)
Hi,
On February, I reported some problems with my office PCs running 2.4.17. I tried 2.4.18 with the PC on my desk and observed the same problem. But, comparing interrupts mapping with the machines running 2.2.20, I noticed that my machine (2.4.18) mapped the Ethernet NICs interrupts to interrupt 9, a high priority vector also shared by ACPI and USB, instead of 10 like the other PCs (2.2.20).
Quoted 1 line
From the BIOS setup, I forced the PCI slot with the NIC to use interrupt
7 (low priority) and since then my machine runs without problem.
Since these 3 PCs have DEC chips based NICs, I suspect a possible problem with the tulip driver, something like a status bit not cleared before re-enabling the chip's interrupt, which only results into a catastrophic situation when the associated interrupt vector has a very high priority (4)? However, these are just speculations and I don't have the knowledge required to quickly verify them.
Robin
P.S. I'm not subscribed to the lkml ...
Apparently not :-(, it froze again during a level 0 backup.
Sorry if my original message revived hope to people with similar hardware facing the same kind of problem (the empty set?).
Robin