spurious interrupt message

[K.C. Chan]

Does any one know what this mean, "spurious interrupt 8259A interrupt: IRQ7". What device is the system yakking about? Any suggestion? Thanks.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

maybe this helps,

http://www7.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~ksjh/research/cluster/timesync/sprint.html

Robert-Jan.

[K.C. Chan]

This is on AMD athon CPU and running RH7.3 with a compiled kernel version of 2.4.20; default kernel that came with redhat 7.3 is running ok; why does the new kernel yak about this spurious interrupt message? Any idea? Thanks.

[Stuart Browne]

Sometimes debugging messages make it through the release cycle.

Other times it's an obscure branch of code which in 'normal operation' wouldn't get reached, but some misclaneous piece of hardware causes code to go down there.

It's a common enough occurance for the diverse range of developers that maintain the kernel source tree.

Since the people who maintain the release cycle might not have the exact piece of hardware which aggrivates the message to show up, these things slip though.

Recent example is with Compaq ML330's on-board SCSI controller and RH7.3 displayed a imilar message.

I don't beleive it's anything to be concerned about, so short of modifying kernel source code yourself (you feel up to that?), just ignore it.