APIC: what is it good for? Can I switch it off?
Hi List!
I am trying to find the reason for our fileserver to shutdown unexpectedly
(and without any warning entries in the logs). I have come across a
warning during bootup:
"Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7"
As a consequence (??) the ERR field in /proc/interrupts increases steadily
(by an amount of about 60 per hour).
What does that mean? Is there a hardware glitch??
After some Google'ing I found that "Spurious ..." seems to be a warning
which might be related to APIC and IO-APIC being activated in the
kernel-config. As one source mentioned, the APIC is for communication of
CPU in SMP-machines. We only have one CPU, so can I safely switch it off
in the config?
On another note: what would be the difference to disabling it via "noapic"
appended to the boot command? Does that do the same trick?
Many thankls for your answers,
Stefan (debian @ goessling . de)
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