21:12 Friday, July 07 2006

what's your vector?

A few days ago, I installed FC5 on a Toshiba Tecra M3 notebook. The initial installation was uneventful, and I immediately performed a 'yum update' to bring it up to date with reality. That's when badness set in. As soon as the onboard Marvell NIC (which uses the sky2 module) comes up, I start seeing the following error about 10 times/second, nonstop:
unexpected IRQ trap at vector 12
After some googling, it turns out that this message means that some device on IRQ12 is generating a ridiculous number of interrupts. The rub here is that the i8042 module is what is using IRQ12, and my understanding is that module is for keyboards & mice. None of this makes any sense, because the errors only appear when sky2 gets used, which is not using IRQ12. Surprisingly, this craziness doesn't seem to be impacting performance at all, so its still usable, but i'm stumped for a solution.
In other news, my employer had their annual company picnic today. David was super excited, and seemed to have a pretty good time. The food was alright, nothing too exciting, but its free, so I can't complain.
Oh, and the cool Linus quote of the day is "so EFI has this cool shell, a loadable driver framework, and other nice features. Where 'nice' obviously means 'much more complex than the simple things they designed in the late seventies back when people were stupid and just wanted things to work'".