Hi.

I just purchased an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, and am having some
issues with it. My problem's not the usual Nforce2 beefs -- I'm using
a SoundBlaster Live! for audio and an Intel ServerPRO 100+ NIC, so I
don't care about the onboard sound and network drivers so much,
although I have gotten those working. What I do care about is the fact
that after about 15-60 minutes of uptime, the system hangs in most
circumstances.

The first kernel I tried on the machine was an 2.4.20 kernel (based on
the Debian kernel-source-2.4.20 package) that I'd built for the
motherboard that had been in the box before. After getting frustrated
enough with the hangs that resulted that I began to worry that my
hardware was bunk, I upgraded to kernel 2.4.21-rc1-ac4, and after
quite a few contortions to get it to boot, realized that it had the
same problem. I knew that the A7N8X had some limited APIC support, so
I compiled that into the kernel, and rebooted.

That appeared to work, except that it slowed down the machine's
performance by a factor of 3 (looking at /proc/interrupts when I was
running the APIC code enabled, I think the kernel was spending a ton
of its time processing (spurious?) interrupts generated by the APIC).
The whole reason I upgraded my motherboard was for improved
performance, so this was obviously unacceptable. I rebooted with
'pci=noacpi noapic' appended to the command line, and got my
performance back, along with the hangs. I get the message 'spurious
8259A interrupt: IRQ7.' in dmesg at startup, and /proc/interrupts
shows a fair number of ERRs.

Does anyone have any clues as to what's going on? I've included the
output of lspci, /proc/interrupts, and the dmesg with the APIC enabled
and disabled, and I'm happy to provide any additional information /
debugging assistance necessary. Any configuration gotchas / patches I
should be aware of?

Please Cc: me on any replies. Thanks.

yours,
Forrest Norvell

-- 
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