> Hi.
> Does anybody know why I get the kernel message "spurious 8259A interrupt:
> IRQ7."? This message comes every time I boot. I guess I have an
> kernel driver
> too much in my kernel. Which is it?
> Thanks for any help.
> K. Dohmann

Historically (I.e. - under DOS And Windows) it meant that the 8359 PIC
(programmable interrupt controller) indicated to the CPU that there was an
interrupt request from hardware attached to that interrupt, but when the
driver got around to looking at the hardware, the hardware said it didn't
generate an interrupt.

In the early days of Windows and the early days of Intel chipsets we used to
see this a lot. It was (and is, I think) generally a hardware problem on the
MB when power is being applied. How it is handled is OS specific. Early on a
single spurious interrupt would cause Windows to completely shut of using
that piece of hardware. (I.e. - the interrupt got masked in the PIC and
could never interrupt after that.) Later on Windows got smarter and reset
the interrupt in case it was a power up problem on the MB, but if it kept
happening would shut it off.

I do not know what the standard procedure for Linux is.

If you can warm boot the system and it doesn't appear, then that's like the
explanation. If you see it on warm boots, then it's more likely a hardware
problem of some type.

Hope that helps explain what might be happening.

--
gentoo-user <at> gentoo.org mailing list