[SGVLUG] More laptop fun--IRQ assignments

[Dustin]

Heh, I'm having all sorts of fun hitting problems from a new angle.  I've
seen occasional dropped packets, which could very be ISP wierdness but 
didn't seem to affect the desktop going over the same DSL modem.  So I 
took a quick look and found that video, audio, ethernet, and one of the 
USB hubs were all on IRQ 11.

Regardless of whether that was the problem (and now that I think of it I
might have gotten unlucky and plugged the webcam into the one USB port
that was on that IRQ), I'd like to be able to reassign IRQs.  I do plan to
record with the laptop and would like the ability to put the soundcard by
itself at a high priority.

Funny thing about laptops, though: the BIOS appears intentionally crippled
and omits critical capability...like the ability to manually assign IRQs.  
(Gee, nobody ever needed to do that, right?)  I guess I've never really
seen how to reassign IRQs in the OS itself, so I'm in new territory again.  
Some research suggests that reassigning IRQs may be possible but didn't
turn up anything more definite than the existence of an obsolete and
unmaintained patch to the APIC kernel code that actually sets up the
vector.  I did build an APIC kernel which works fine, but doesn't solve
the conflict--it just moves the overloaded IRQ to #16.

I'll probably have to take this to the Linux Audio Users list, since
that's the biggest concentration of people who regularly fiddle with this
stuff, but maybe someone here already knows how to reassign IRQs in
software.

Dustin