On 16 Nov 2000, at 9:44, Nathan J. Williams wrote:

> PCI devices and
> their drivers *must* be able to share interrupts. 

Hi,

could it be that IRQ sharing was introduced with PCI 2.x spec? IIRC 
my old Pentium und PentiumPro boards required a different IRQ for 
each PCI slot. Even today some cards do not like IRQ sharing, 
some 3Com ethernet cards do not seem to work correctly over a 
longer period of time if they have no own IRQ (strange effects like 
forgetting the media type and resetting to use AUI) and one of the 
Guillemot soundcards I had here will work if it has an own IRQ.

In fact most hardware manufacturers will ask to assign an own IRQ 
to their cards if called for help when there are problems with their 
products. 

mike