jchacon@genuity.net writes:
> 
> Let me walk you through it then.
> 
> Most devices in the system these days get auto-assigned by the bios in some
> way (pci, pnpbios,etc). The bios choses anywhere it wants for the most part
> that doesn't conflict and in my case irq 10 doesn't conflict because nothing
> else got assigned there, just that GENERIC hard coded something there.

FWIW, my BIOS allows me to mark an interrupt as "ISA/Legacy" which prevents
PCI/PNP cards from using it.  Pretty every BIOS on every machine I have allows
this.  It is a "normal" feature on an Award BIOS definitely.
Also, some of the PCs with a custom BIOS provide a DOS configuration utility
that does something similar.

[ But certainly the code should be fixed anyway. :) ]

-Andrew