On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 08:14:22AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> However, I have run into two strange I/O errors: 1) a "soft error"
> ("lost interrupt") every so often on my IDE device (though it never
> seems to actually cause a problem other than a 60-second delay), and 2)
> my network card goes down after a few minutes of use.
> 
> I pulled an old crappy -- but supported -- PCI realtek from another
> machine and slapped it in this box.  Worked for awhile, then got a bunch
> of watchdog errors about rtk0 on the console.  (The on-board nvidia
> device is not supported in NetBSD)
> 
> I am hoping at this point that I have the APIC problem you described.
> However, with an unreliable network connection and hard disk, combined
> with the fact that I've never built any part of the NetBSD base system
> before, I'm not really sure that I'll be able to build a new kernel :-)

Hmm.. well, RealTeks are known to be crappy, so watchdog timeouts aren't
that unusual for some versions of them.

Do you have another type of network card lying aroung?

If a different card has problems too, you may have a more general
interrupt problem somehow, which may indeed be an APIC problem. Which
would explain the IDE issue as well.

You can try to not use APICs by disabling the ioapic and MPBIOS lines
in the GENERIC kernel config, and compiling that. However, I do
consider that to be somewhat of an unsupported configuration.. but
it should still work.

- Frank