Safety of IRQ during i/o

Bill Davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:58:12 -0400 (EDT)

The man page for hdparm is a bit dated on the -u flag allowing ints during
i/o, warning about the dangers of using kernels older than 2.0.13. No
problem there, but what are the more current implications?

I would think that this would be safe when using DMA, and likely to be
safe for PIO and more recent chipsets, but I wouldn't want to actually
tell anyone that.

Therefore:
1 - the man page would benefit from an update regarding recent kernels
from this millenium, if only to reassure readers.
2 - any better way to tell if allowing ints will cause problems than just
to try it? Not desirable on large machines, but it was off and I am
seeing serial problems on the OOB access modem.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.


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