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Date:      Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:03:53 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Cc:        Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>
Subject:   Re: assigning interrupts
Message-ID:  <200811131503.53975.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081113154003.GC1750@britannica.bec.de>
References:  <491BFB68.7050405@infoweapons.com> <20081113104054.GA17501@icarus.home.lan> <20081113154003.GC1750@britannica.bec.de>

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On Thursday 13 November 2008 10:40:03 am Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 02:40:54AM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > Otherwise, consider purchasing a motherboard that has an APIC (this is
> > not a typo) increasing the IRQ count to 256.
> 
> This is wrong. The first IO-APIC gives you 8 additional interrupts to
> the 16 ISA interrupt lines. Every additional IO-APIC gives you 24 more.
> Most modern chipsets have one IO-APIC, at least for non-embedded
> systems. It doesn't mean you don't get interrupt sharing though.

I/O APICs are not hardwired to 24 pins.  Early Pentium SMP systems actually 
only had 16 pins on their I/O APICs.  I've seen I/O APICs with 32 pins, etc.  
There is a register in the I/O APIC that lets software know how many pins it 
contains.

-- 
John Baldwin



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