On Monday 24 November 2003 16:49, Damon Register wrote:
Maybe someone else can correct me if I am wrong but when I had this problem over a year ago, I even contacted the writer of the NIC driver. He told me that sharing would work but only if the BIOS was set to NO for PnP operating system. Perhaps things have changed since then but Linux did not handle PnP like Windows 9x so the BIOS had to do it. When I changed to BIOS management instead of OS management, my problem was solved and the two net cards were able to share an interrupt.
The only difference I've seen, with interrupt asignement is with cards that are ISA cards. If you have one of these, you used to go to the BIOS and assign that IRQ as a legendary/ISA interrupt (meaning the BIOS would not assign it to a PCI device). So, that such devices could use the preconfigured resource tables they had. And, personally I've never encountered this, but it's also stated that some of the first PCI NIC's suffered similar problems when IRQ's were concerned as the old ISA cards. So, my guess is, that it was because of such a card that you needed to mark it as non-PnP. But Linux has, to my knowledge, always assigned PCI Irq's on its own and separately from the BIOS.