Understanding kernel message 'nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)'

linux linux-kernel linux-device-driver
AbhijitG picture AbhijitG · Dec 13, 2012 · Viewed 29.7k times · Source

I'm trying to understand the meaning of the following message:

irq N:nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)

Does this mean the IRQ handler not processing the response even it has gotten the interrupt? Or that the scheduler failed to call an irq handler?

In what condition is this happening?

Answer

askb picture askb · Nov 19, 2014

Ideally, the above message should be followed by a stack trace, which should help you determine which subsystem is causing the issue. This message means the interrupt handler got stuck due to a overhead, and did not return thus causing the system to disable IRQ#X. This is seen in cases of a buggy firmware.

The irqpoll option needs to be added to grub.conf, which means, when an interrupt is not handled, search all known interrupt handlers for the appropriate handlers and also check all handlers on each timer interrupt. This is sometimes useful to get systems with broken firmware running. The kernel command line in grub.conf should look like the following:

kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda1 quiet irqpoll

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