[asterisk-biz] Recent REMOTE CRASH BUG

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Matt wrote:
> However, we will not be purchasing any more Digium cards until Digium
> realizes that PCI is an extremely old standard.  As it stands right now,
> and someone may correct me if I'm wrong, all Digium cards are PCI-X, and
> hence have issues with sharing IRQs.    Unfortunately, as you will see
> if you do a search on the mailing list, most new motherboards insist on
> sharing IRQs with things... this causes audio issues.   

If you believe PCI (or PCI-X) has anything at all to do with interrupt
sharing issues, you are mistaken. If you believe that PCI Express has
anything to do with solving interrupt sharing issues, again you are
mistaken.

PCI, PCI-X and PCI Express all support the same interrupt handling
methodologies; PCI Express just provides a different signaling
mechanism. It is up to the system's chipset designers to decide how
those interrupts are going to be handled (XT-PIC, APIC, etc.). It would
certainly be possible for there to be a PCI Express system that did not
use an APIC for IRQ routing, but you'll never see one because PCI
Express systems are brand-new and all brand-new chipsets have APICs.

> Until Digium gets with 2007, we will be purchasing Sangoma PCI-express
> cards.   I hate to do it, because like I said I want to support Digium,
> but their hardware is not staying with the times.

I won't disagree that our lack of PCI Express support is something we'd
like to solve, but IRQ sharing issues will not be solved by just
switching to PCI Express (which in most cases involves nothing more than
sticking a PCI Express -to- PCI-X bridge chip on the board). We have
already made some significant driver improvements in the last couple of
months in this area, and our customers (and support department) are now
reporting that in nearly every case of a suspected 'IRQ sharing' problem
updating to the latest Zaptel 1.2/1.4 release cures the problem (note
that I am not in support nor do I deal with these issues directly... I
am only reporting what I have been told).