Re: spurious interrupt

[Andy Firman <andy@firman.us>]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 06:47:01PM +0100, Robert Storey wrote:
> For some reason, when I logged on today I received this message:
> 
>   "spurious 8259A, interrupt: IRQ7"
> 
> I'm not sure if this is anything to worry about at all. Anyone have an idea what it means?

I did a little searching for you.  There was a recent thread on this.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200310/msg05114.html

Then I found this for you:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html#spurious-8259A-interrupt

spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ14

    Short summary: It's a hardware problem (usually). Transient Line-noise/crosstalk persuades the PIC
that something happened; this can result in a 'dummy' interrupt being raised, which happens to be IRQ7
with intel's 8259 design.The problem could possibly also be caused by (or instead be caused by) a device
driver not properly masking its interrupts before servicing, this would be the suspect if the IRQ7's were
happening in bursts, or more often than 'several' per day. (Source and additional information)

    Since the message itself is harmless, it's enough to adjust the default loglevel outplut of klogd (the
-c opion) in the syslogd bootscript. See man klogd for details. You can also try recompiling the kernel
and unset CONFIG_LOCAL_APIC.


-Andy