We are having problems with a third party vendors card. Everytime it
shares an IRQ with another PC device, it locks the controller. We've
been able to recreate and fix the symptoms by freeing up the sharing
IRQ resource.

The vendor is trying to integrate a LSI mulitfunction chip that passes
about 120MB/s (yes, 120 Mega Bytes per second) on the PCI bus. This
is near the theroetical bandwidth of the PCI bus.

One caveat that we have is that for stability purposes, we have to use
the "Standard PC" HAL instead of one of the ACPI HAL's available with
XP/2K. This is for compatibility purposes with legacy devices
integrated into our product.

Our ultimate goal is to get the device to share an IRQ. We aren't
going to rewrite their driver.

Are there any BIOS settings or OS fixes that might help to let this
device share an IRQ? Any suggestions? Anyone?

Thanks.

Re: IRQ Sharing causes multi-function adapter to lock PC by Pavel

Pavel
Wed Aug 18 15:32:47 CDT 2004

The point of using the Standard HAL in this case is
to rely on the BIOS in assigning IRQs to PCI devices.
Some BIOSes have option to assign IRQs manualy, exactly for this purpose.
So, the Standard HAL is the OS fix you asked for.
If the vendor has problem in implementing shared IRQ,
please send them to this newsgroup and somebody may help them.
--PA

"Dave" <david_hess@cmicro.com> wrote in message news:370ffe8c.0408180853.71439a8b@posting.google.com...
> We are having problems with a third party vendors card. Everytime it
> shares an IRQ with another PC device, it locks the controller. We've
> been able to recreate and fix the symptoms by freeing up the sharing
> IRQ resource.
>
> The vendor is trying to integrate a LSI mulitfunction chip that passes
> about 120MB/s (yes, 120 Mega Bytes per second) on the PCI bus. This
> is near the theroetical bandwidth of the PCI bus.
>
> One caveat that we have is that for stability purposes, we have to use
> the "Standard PC" HAL instead of one of the ACPI HAL's available with
> XP/2K. This is for compatibility purposes with legacy devices
> integrated into our product.
>
> Our ultimate goal is to get the device to share an IRQ. We aren't
> going to rewrite their driver.
>
> Are there any BIOS settings or OS fixes that might help to let this
> device share an IRQ? Any suggestions? Anyone?
>
> Thanks.