Only just spotted this thread in my inbox. We have a near identical effect on four machines which have
an Asus P5B motherboard with Core 2 Duo processor, running SL 4.4. acpi=off has no effect.


Jan Iven wrote:
> On 16/01/07 12:46, Eva Myers wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> Thank you very much for all your help with setting up my new SL4
>> machine.  I have just one more minor problem: the following sequence
>> of messages appears in the system logs every half hour.
>>
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: irq 217: nobody cared! (screaming interrupt?)
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: irq 217: Please try booting with acpi=off and report a bug
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c0107532>] __report_bad_irq+0x3a/0x77
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c01077a9>] note_interrupt+0xea/0x115
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c0107a55>] do_IRQ+0x143/0x1ae
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c02d51a4>] common_interrupt+0x18/0x20
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c01040e8>] mwait_idle+0x33/0x42
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel:  [<c01040a0>] cpu_idle+0x26/0x3b
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: handlers:
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: [<c0241ae2>] (ide_intr+0x0/0x11e)
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: [<c025a6c0>] (usb_hcd_irq+0x0/0x4b)
>> Jan 16 11:29:35 shanghai kernel: Disabling IRQ #217
> 
> The output from
> # cat /proc/interrupts
> # dmesg
> # lspci -vvv
> could help to at least identify what is going on. Also, you could
> perhaps identify the process that causes this (cronjob? calendar alarm?)
> 
>> This machine has an Intel D965SSCK Core 2 Duo 6300 2MB cache chipset,
>> and I'll post the rest of the specs if you think they are relevant.
>> Is the fix just to add acpi=off to the kernel options?
> 
> acpi=noirq (on the kernel .. line in /boot.grub/grub.conf) is a bit
> softer. But this isn't guaranteed to make the problem go away, if you
> really have a device that tries to send an interrupt.
> 
> Regards
> Jan
> 


-- 
  Alex Finch, Research Fellow, Physics Department, Lancaster University.
+44 (0) 1524 593618   http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/physics/staff/ajf.htm