[PLUG] 2 NICs

Galen Seitz galens at seitzassoc.com
Thu Sep 19 05:47:38 UTC 2002


> >Sharing IRQs isn't necessarily bad.  The PCI bus was design
> >with this in mind.  It is only due to the brain damaged ISA bus that
> >people have come to expect each device to have its own interrupt.  With
> >ISA, if two devices were both in use, no sharing was possible.  With PCI,
> >sharing is not a problem.
> >  
> >
> I am under the impression (and I've experienced the same) that this only 
> applied if the cards sharing the same IRQ weren't the same type of card.
> 
> In other words, a sound card and a NIC could share, but two NICs couldn't.
> 
> Maybe it was my hardware that wouldn't handle it, or the driver couldn't 
> handle it.
> 

The main point I was trying to make was that PCI hardware supports IRQ
sharing.  It is certainly possible that the driver doesn't support it,
though it seems from a quick google search that there are people using
2 ne2k-pci cards.

galen







More information about the PLUG mailing list