USB Drive Controller Failure and Shared IRQ

[Michael Hipp]

Matthew Carpenter wrote:

> I thought it must be the USB controller built into the board.  So I
> bought another one and plugged 'er in.  Same results.  I just ordered a
> replacement Mobo and this morning I notice that IRQ 10 is being shared
> by (this information came from the BIOS boot-screen, not Linux):
> *) The USB controller on the Mobo
> *) The new USB controller (PCI)
> *) The SATA RAID Controller.
> 
> Could this be causing my issues?  I would think that issues caused by
> shared-IRQ would occur next to immediately, and have far worse effects.

Back when I was being tortured every day by satellite Internet, my sat 
modems connected via USB. It was well known to cause problems if the USB 
ports were sharing IRQs with anything else. It was blamed on the fact 
that the sat modems could pump quite a stream of data thereby generating 
lots of interrupts and presumably the hardware/software just couldn't 
deal with it.

I'd say it's certainly a possibility.

Michael