MEPIS Community Forum

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I was sitting here, minding my own business, reading some news when this popped up on the Desktop.

Anyone know what this is about?

You're hosed.

I get it to it only affects M11 64 bit, I have a multi-boot system all *nix, I believe it has something to do with the UEFI bios in the Asus P8Z68-V mobo I have, it will knock out some running processes in Konsole and it will knock out MySQL if it is running, both will restart again. I have not bothered tracking it down as it doesn't bother me enough. I have fiddled with my bios and can tell you it is not fixed with enabling or disabling the Limit CPUID Max choice.
Good luck

PS yours is IRQ 9 mine is IRQ 18, guess I am twice as lucky

What? Again?

Mine's a ten-year-old 32-bit Gigabyte board. Maybe IRQ 9 is just too tired to go on.

There are quite a lot of similar issues both here and if you google it, your problem and mine sound different, although it is obviously the same trigger mechanism within the kernel

I found a message in syslog saying "IRQ 9—nobody cared (try booting with kernel option "irqpoll")," then more related IRQ stuff, ending with the message I posted. After I stopped laughing, I tried the irqpoll boot option.

As best I can gather, it appears to be related to my Ensoniq sound card, which works fine by the way. The bootup BIOS messages show it on IRQ 9, but the "irqpoll" messages in syslog show it has been rerouted to IRQ 18. My guess is that "nobody cared" means there is no handler for IRQ 9. I love an OS that has a sense of humor.

In any case, everything is working fine.

I cannot agree more the number of times I have some piece of humour buried in my **nix OS by some kernel hacker long retired - do hackers retire or just start to smell bad ?.
Just as well it is not the mainstream OS you would need to re-install and it would not be funny.

Well, irq9 has always been a special case. Original PC systems only had an 8bit irq system (0 -> 7). When they needed more they used irq2 to cascade to irqs 8 -> 15. That made direct calls to irq2 go to irq9 instead, giving PCs 15 irqs instead ot 16. It also made irq9 kinda-sorta shared by default even with only one device assigned to it. In the olden days, there were some cards that just refused to work on irq9 for that reason.

The usual issue with the "IRQ x nobody cared" error is that too many devices are sharing one IRQ. Having your SATA controller share an IRQ with either a network or video card can be enough to cause this.

Often in your BIOS you can change the IRQ settings for each slot to avoid this kind of conflict. On your Motherboard that would be in the PNP/PCI Configuration menu. Often just making sure that the IRQs are available for PCI devices (instead of legacy ISA devices) and using the Reset Configuration Data setting will reshuffle IRQs to a better setting.

For those without that kind of screen in their BIOS you have to switch a card from one slot to another.
Most motherboards attempt to avoid sharing IRQs if there are enough free IRQs. You can free up some if you don't use your onboard serial (IRQs 3 & 4) or parallel ports (IRQs 5 & 7) by disabling them in the BIOS.
It can take a little fiddling but this issue is nearly always fixable.

I remember having to switch cards. And nowadays with no Parallel or Serial Ports needed I disable them in BIOS as standard procedure.