Subject: NetBSD 3.0 and stray interrupts...
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Darren Reed <darrenr@NetBSD.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/29/2006 18:32:32
On saturday I spent a large amount of my time pulling what's left of
my hair out trying to work out why my NetBSD box was panic'ing.
There was some obscure panic/trap message but this didnt mean much.
I was concerned that it might have been related to some ipfilter
changes I was testing...but I also made one other change that day.

I put in a dlink wireless card to see if its chipset was supported
by NetBSD.  It isn't and it didn't seem to be doing any harm so I
left it in a PCI slot...

The fix to my panics was to remove the wireless PCI card.
Why, I don't know.  Is it likely that it was generating stray
interrupts and that NetBSD wasn't handling them well?

Or maybe it has a virus or...beyond the stray interupt excuse,
I'm left empty.  Are there any known stray interrupt problems?

As a datapoint, I didn't see any messages saying that they were
being received.

And given that it was causing ddb to double panic and render
the ddb prompt unresponsive, does anyone have any suggestions
on how to determine what the problem was?  And no, crash dumps
wouldn't write, either.

Darren