Hi, basically I have some interrupt problems with kernel 2.6 on my Thinkpad. And I'm looking urgently for assistence after having googled a lot and having tried several things to resolve my prob. Excuse the long text here, but I wish to give as much information as possible to enable someone to give me some helpful hints. The details: I use an IBM Thinkpad T40p (centrino chip) and an internal atheros WiFi pci card with kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2 and atrpms Madwifi driver kernel-module-madwifi-2.6.7-1.494.2.2-0.8.5.5-7.rhfc2.at By default configuration (acpi, no special command line options) all the PCI interrupts are route to irg11. The current madwifi driver and/or the 2.6 kernel seem not to be able to handle the irq sharing. I can load the driver, but the driver does not connect to an AP. Sometimes it may connect, but after some work there are a lot of messages like "kernel: ath0: hardware error; resetting" in the log and the connections slows down to zero transfer rate. I tried to use kernel 2.6.8-1.521 and the actual CVS tree of madwifi (with recommended patches), but this combination is even worse. With FC1 there is no problem at all. By some experimentation I suppose there is an IRQ problem. I tried to change the bios setup and assigned the irq manually. This made the kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2 work quite stable. Two problems / questions: a) how to disable the floppy driver permanently? The system does not have a floppy drive so I disabled the floppy controller in bios and disabled the floppy driver in modprobe.conf by alias floppy off or alias block-major-2 off as I found by searching the list. And it seems to work, I don't find a floppy module with lsmod. When I disconnect my usb mouse I get: > Sep 5 00:23:12 littlePiet kernel: usb 3-1: USB disconnect, address 2 > Sep 5 00:23:13 littlePiet kernel: inserting floppy driver for > 2.6.7-1.494.2.2 > Sep 5 00:23:13 littlePiet kernel: floppy0: Unable to grab IRQ6 > for the floppy driver > Sep 5 00:23:13 littlePiet modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting floppy > (/lib/modules/2.6.7-1.494.2.2/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko): > Device or resource busy > Sep 5 00:23:14 littlePiet kernel: ath0: hardware error; resetting > Sep 5 00:23:45 littlePiet last message repeated 201 times The ath0 hardware error message is repeated endless and I have to reboot the system in order to gain network access again. Question: how can I avoid the loading of the floppy module after usb disconnect? (the same problem arise when I change the state of the pcmcia system) b) how to avoid the system to assign irq'a automatically? ACPI seems to handle the assignment of irqs. I find a lot of messages like > kernel: ACPI: Using PIC for interrupt routing > kernel: PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing > kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.1[B] -> GSI 4 > (level, low) -> IRQ 4 With the following interrupts I can operate the system quite stable: [root@little log]# cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 2100476 XT-PIC timer 1: 7980 XT-PIC i8042 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 4: 31034 XT-PIC ehci_hcd, uhci_hcd 6: 20421 XT-PIC uhci_hcd, ath0 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 9: 683 XT-PIC acpi 10: 1 XT-PIC yenta, Intel 82801DB-ICH4 11: 104727 XT-PIC uhci_hcd, yenta, radeon@PCI:1:0:0 12: 10375 XT-PIC i8042 14: 21546 XT-PIC ide0 15: 21535 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 ERR: 0 By googling I found the parameter noapic as a miracle cure for all irq problems. But detailed investigations showed that this parameter seems to be for smp systems only. Others mentioned the kernel parameter pci=noapic to prevent acpi to automatically handle irq assignment. But this seems not to work with fedora - at least I find the same kernel messages in the log file /w and w/o that parameter. Well: how to avoid automatic irq assignment? Any help appreciated. Thanks Peter