Anders Johansson wrote:

On Saturday 10 August 2002 15.07, Marco Teeuwen wrote:

...

Hello everybody,

on one of my machines, I always get this message on the console or xconsole.

The machine: Athlon 1000 with SuSE 8.0 GeForce2 GTS SBPCI + SBLive. RTL8139 clone nic

Does anybody have an idea what is causing this? It doesn't seem to cause any harm, but I'm just curious.

According to

http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/applnots/27282301.pdf

a spurious interrupt is when an interrupt is issued but turned off before it can be acknowledged. Sort of a power blip on the interrupt pin.

Also, according to the 8259A source in the kernel, it's "usually a sign of hardware problems" (/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/i8259.c)

regards Anders

Actually it is a non fatal glitch between Linux and the Athlon chip. They all do it, and it causes no harm whatever. You will just have to live with it. Perhaps someday AMD will firure this out and fix it. Lawrence Sayre ------------------------------------------------------ My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a moral being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. Ayn Rand (in the appendix to 'Atlas Shrugged') ------------------------------------------------------

On Sat, 10 Aug 2002 16:11:22 +0200 Anders Johansson wrote:

Also, a quick search on the linux kernel mailing list shows that it happens on Intel Pentium machines too. I haven't been able to find anything on the web pointing to a clear answer.

This is the best I could come up with: The message means that something made the kernel think the interrupt controller received a spurious interrupt. Duh?? The '7' is irrelevant. The controller defaults to that when it doesn't understand what is going on. -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation