[rescue] Some days ....

[Phil Stracchino]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 10:52:03AM -0400, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
> >From: Phil Stracchino <alaric at caerllewys.net>
> >To be fair, it hasn't been that bad in a looooooooong time ....  and
> >even then, at least half of it was the dain-brammaged OS's fault.
> 
> ummm... IMHO PC hardware is seriously lacking in IRQs and DMA channels....

Amen, brother.  IBM really copped out by just daisychaining two
8-channel IRQ chips in the AT architecture.  They should have built in a
single 32-channel (or better yet, 64-channel) chip, IMHO.


> I've also had an issue with motherboard with lots of built in goodies
> consuming so many IRQ resources that adding hardware was easiest by
> disabling onboard devices that I didn't need (second com port).

Yup.  Older IBM Thinkpads were particularly bad about this ...  they
shipped with so many integrated peripherals, and a BIOS so anal about
interrupt sharing, that it was impossible to simultaneously enable all
of them at once.

(To make matters worse, the application that configured the BIOS was a
Windows app, so if the BIOS settings got hosed and the machine wouldn't
boot, you were SOL.)


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