[realtek] What's 'Interrupt line blocked' mean? (fwd)

[Bill Soudan]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Ferry van Steen wrote:

> > Finally, to my question - what's this 'interrupt line blocked, status 4'
> > message mean that I see in my syslog?
> >
> >     kernel: eth0: RTL8139 Interrupt line blocked, status 4.
> >
> > Under Linux, with the D-Link card, I receive this message randomly while
> > I'm doing my stress tests, but the card continues to work without even an
> > rx or tx error.
>
> My GUESS would be that the 2 cards use the same IRQ. One of them is using
> the Interrupt and doesn't let go in time for the other to use it. Try moving
> them to other slots.

That's what I was thinking too... I'm going to try that as my next step,
thanks for the note.  Maybe I'll try to do some investigating using
/proc/pci to try and confirm this, though I don't know much about PCI
interrupts.

The other reason this makes sense to me is because IIRC, Windows 2000
doesn't like to share interrupts.  In fact you must be *sure* your video
card in particular doesn't share an interrupt.

Thanks,
Bill