observation: sata problems when using devfs with 2.6.0beta7

[Howard Duck]

Hi 
 
I understand that devfs is deprecated, and i personally don't need (or
suggest) 
this issue to be fixed - but there are maybe some people that run into this 
problem too, and they may profit from this information... Now here's the
story: I 
have a intel 865pe based mainboard with 4 pata devices and one sata disk
(the 
one i boot off). Gentoo linux "needs" devfs support therefore i added it to
my 
kernel config. When i booted i got following warning/debug messages: 
 
irq: 18 nobody cared! 
*some hex output i was too lazy to write down* 
Disabling IRQ #18 
 
IRQ 18 is assigned to the SATA controller (there are also a few lkml posts
that 
describe this error). At first i thought it was some problem with sata - to
verify this 
i started to test with a almost featureless kernel and added one feature
after 
another to see what breaks the system. The irq18 problem only appeared when
i 
added devfs support to the kernel. I have no real proof that devfs support
affects 
the sata controller/disk, but i built many different kernel configs and
whenever i 
added devfs support the irq18 warnings appeared, and whenever i removed
devfs 
support they did not appear - so i guess devfs is the actual problem. 
 
I currently run gentoo-linux with a SMP enabled 2.6.0beta7 kernel with alsa
and 
the nvidia-drivers but without devfs support. Everything works fine for me,
seems 
like devfs support isn't that badly needed for gentoo ;) to turn off support
for it 
simply add gentoo=nodevfs to your kernel boot-parameters. Creating the /dev 
entries for alsa can be done with the snddevices script provided by the
alsa-driver 
source package. I didn't need any other /dev nodes, because i don't have USB

peripherals and the likes... 
 
now on to the gentoo-developers persuading them to drop the devfs dependency

;) 
 Michael Kefeder 
 
p.s.: i'm not subscribed to lkml - please put me on CC when answering. 
 

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