*BSD News Article 81674


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Unknown kernel message
Date: 25 Oct 1996 22:13:35 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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"Grigory Lipich" <gri@univ.kiev.ua> wrote:

> motherboard based on Triton II PCI Chipset. 16M RAM, 512K Cache.
> Also i have installed SoundBlaster Pro Compatible card (support
> for it is not compiled into kernel) which is configured to use
> INT 7 and I/0 220.
> 
> From time to time i have a message at console:
> 
> /kernel: stray irq 7
> 
> What does it mean ?

This used to be a FAQ... but i cannot find it there right now.

Basically, stray IRQ 7's means the kernel is seeing IRQ 7 requests it
doesn't anticipate, i.e. there's no driver assigned to this vector.
(This sounds odd in your case, since the soundblapper driver is
supposed to be configured at this interrupt level.  Do you have
misconfigured something?)

In general, stray IRQ 7's can happen all over the place if there are
spikes on one of your interrupt lines.  The spike triggers an IRQ in
the PIC (8259-emulation), but by the time the PIC completed with
prioritizing the interrupt request, the request itself has already
disappeared.  So it simply assigns it to IRQ 7 (normally the lowest
priority), and raises the interrupt signal of the CPU.

To summarize, it's normally poor hardware, but nothing to worry if
everything continues to work fine nevertheless.  All kinds of hardware
have been reported to cause this: floppy controllers, IDE adapters,
VGA cards etc.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)