A possible irq override patch

A friend suggested that I see if there were any updates to my BIOS. I had checked before, but I thought I might get lucky. Lo and behold, a new BIOS (F.1A) had been posted in early November. Of course, the things it claimed to fix had nothing to do with my problems, but I figured I'd give it a shot anyway. No dice. It does exactly what it says it does. Those bastards.

Moving on to google, I found my first promising lead in a July 2000 post on kerneltraffic.org from a guy with the same problem (bios reporting incorrect interrupt types with a need to override). A few days later, he responded to his own post saying he had found a patch from July 1999 that allowed the override. The patch applied to the 2.2.10 kernel, but at least it was an idea.

Hoping that this feature had made its way permanently into the kernel, I added ioapic_level=10,11 to my kernel options and rebooted. Absolutely nothing changed. So much for luck. I'll stick this in my back pocket for now. I'd rather not write my own kernel patch if I can help it. But if it comes to that, I'll do it.