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This page contains information on using Linux with the Intel "Providence" PR440FX motherboard. It was written by Larry M. Augustin at VA Research.
How to use the Intel PR440FX motherboard appears to be a FAQ. It seems to come up at least twice a week on the eepro100 mailing list now.
You can force the on-board Adaptec SCSI controller and EEPro100 ethernet controllers to different IRQs by clearing the CMOS.
Some things to be careful of:
1. The AIC 7880 has Ultra SCSI disabled by default. You have to
enable it in the Adaptec BIOS setup. Note also that a lot of useful
settings are disabled in the Linux driver by default. Edit the
aic7xxx.c file to see what choices you have. Only do this if you know
what you're doing.
2. Disabling the IDE interfaces and the USB interface in the system
BIOS is a good idea to free up interrupts. You will find that as you
add PCI devices the PR440FX will tend to assign the same IRQ to
different devices unless there are plenty of free IRQs.
3. Be sure to get the latest BIOS rev. Older BIOSes tended to not
assign certain IRQs.
Here's a little message I sent to the linux-vortex mailing list on
this subject some time back:
Setting the IRQ can be a difficult and trying process. Before Plug &
Play we could set IRQs directly. Now with Plug & Play the process is
harder because we must indirectly coerce the system BIOS into doing
the right thing. It's called progress.
Here are some suggestions depending on what your board and BIOS
support:
1. If your motherboard BIOS lets you map specific PCI slots to
specific IRQs, do that. Most BIOSes don't allow this.
2. Clear your system CMOS to clear the current IRQ settings. When
your machine boots, enter BIOS setup and do two things:
i. assign as many things to fixed IRQs and I/O addresses as the BIOS
allows (e.g. assign all the serial ports)
ii. disable things that you don't use that could free an IRQ, e.g.
a second IDE disk controller.
You have two goals in this approach: 1) give the MB BIOS as few
devices to configure as possible, and 2) free up as many IRQs as
possible so each PCI device will get a different IRQ.
3. Move the card to a different PCI slot. This will often change
the IRQ assignment.
4. Insert PCI cards one at a time.
i. Mark exactly one IRQ available in the system BIOS. Boot
the system and make sure that IRQ is free.
ii. Insert the card to use that IRQ.
iii. Boot the system and make sure the card uses that IRQ.
iv. Free another IRQ.
v. Boot the system and make sure nothing else has moved and the
new IRQ is free.
vi. Insert the the card for the free IRQ.
vii. Repeat until all cards reach the correct IRQ.
5. Write a Linux utility to edit the BIOS's ESCD data structure and
set configuration information for DCDs. Distribute it to the
world and make all our lives easier. :-)
Larry Augustin
VA Research, Inc.
1235 Pear Ave., Suite 109
Mountain View, CA 94043
Tel: +1.415.934.3666
Fax: +1.415.964.7668
Email: lma@varesearch.com
Web: http://www.varesearch.com