"device apic" required for atheros wireless driver?

[Craig Boston]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 08:55:33PM -0800, Neil Short wrote:
> finally it became evident that, at least on my system,
> "device apic" under the "SMP kernel" section of the
> configuration file seems to be required.

What is your system exactly?  Apologies if you've mentioned that before.
I did a quick scan of recent list traffic and didn't see your original
post.

Are you using ACPI?

It sounds like you probably have a broken BIOS.  I've seen a few ACPI
DSDTs lately that have completely bogus IRQ routing in the !apic case.
Most likely they assume apic will always be used because Windows XP uses
it if present with no way to disable it.

On my laptop it looked like they hadn't even bothered to change the
default _PRT method in the template that came from the BIOS vendor.

In any case, if your system has an apic and everything works fine using
it, it's probably better to leave it in anyway.  It might be possible
to hack in the correct routing manually, but you're less likely to end
up with every device sharing a single IRQ when in apic mode, so you're
usually better off.

Craig