Interrupt posted but not delivered, IRQ blocked by another device?

I’ve posted this here for anyone, like me, who comes across this problem and can’t find the answer or if I have this problem again then I can look up what to do again. 🙂 This is what I sent to the NewChix mailing list and the great reply I got!

-my message- I did a fresh install of Kubuntu on a machine at work the other day. It appeared that everything went okay during the install. I didn’t configure the network during the install. When I went to configure it later I couldn’t get it to work. I’m pretty sure all the settings are correct. It can’t ping any machine on the network- destination host unreachable. I left it at that for the day.

Next day when I turned it on I got this message during boot Interrupt posted but not delivered IRQ blocked by another device? The machine has onboard network which is disabled and a 3Com network card. I’ve Googled for answers and there are lots but not any that I can follow to a successful resolution. The main response is as follows:

This is an APIC error which seems to appear more often with 2.4 kernels. It’s not related to the network card, juts that the 3c59x driver tests for this condition and prints this warning. Probably your best bet is to boot with “noapic” kernel option.

-reply- This is almost certainly correct there are a few kernel options that you can put in Grub to stop the kernel working in certain ways. There is a way called APIC of getting more interrupts than the usual 15. It can sometimes play havoc with older machines whose BIOSES were made at the same time as the early APIC stuff.

In /boot/grub/menu.lst you will find your Grub menu, you need to edit this file as root and look for
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.10-5-386
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10-5-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.10-5-386
savedefault
boot

At the end of the line – kernel /boot/vmlinuz….ro quiet splash noapic is where you put noapic.
If this doesn’t work try pci=noacpi as well as or in place of noapic.

Oh yeah and this well worded and clear reply is from my big sister 🙂 I’d tried phoning her about it but we’d missed each other so I posted it to the list.

6 thoughts on “Interrupt posted but not delivered, IRQ blocked by another device?

  • October 25, 2005 at 10:10 am
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    And it worked wonderfully!!!! 🙂

    Reply
  • April 26, 2007 at 2:45 pm
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    Great for me it works also (with debian sarge) ! thanks a lot

    Reply
  • December 5, 2008 at 6:32 pm
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    Works on fedora 10 – have been at this about 4 hours post upgrade to Fedora 10 and started getting network crashes with “Interrupt posted but not ….” Thank you so much for your blogging. 🙂

    Reply
  • December 5, 2008 at 9:38 pm
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    Not a problem, glad it’s helped a few people 🙂

    Reply
  • February 18, 2010 at 8:44 am
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    Fantastic, helped me with a Fedora core 6 machine, thanks!

    Reply
  • November 6, 2010 at 8:12 am
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    And you're my life savior 😀

    Works on Ubuntu 10.10 Server

    Reply

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