Interrupt sharing causing I/O errors when writing to Firewire IDE disks?

Hi folks,

Along with many other people on these lists, I have experienced problems
with writing to Firewire disks. The typical symptoms are that the computer
slows right down, and the kernel log fills up with device I/O errors. The
disk then becomes inaccessible. Reloading the ieee1394 modules can lead
to a kernel oops.

This has happened to me regularly on three different systems: two VAIO
laptops (one running Red Hat 9, one running a custom 2.4.22 kernel), and
an old Pentium III system with a Lucent FW323 (rev 4) PCI Firewire
controller. The computers were connected to one of two different external
Firewire IDE disk devices.

Following a suggestion from one person that USB devices may be
interacting, I unplugged the USB devices. Since then, no problems.

Looking at /proc/interrupts shows that the USB hub was sharing a line with
ohci1394.

Another person I know has Firewire problems without USB, but she has eth0
sharing an interrupt line with ohci1394.

So... perhaps there are some issues with interrupt sharing? Perhaps a
module is enabling/disabling interrupts on the shared line and affecting
other modules?

It would be good to fix this, since otherwise Firewire disks are
essentially unusable on Linux.

Regards,
Michael Ashley

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Received on Tue Oct 21 07:44:16 2003