stall after floppy drive recognition / shared irqs

[Casey Jaymes]

Howdy; I would like to start contributing to the Hurd, but I need to do
development on my laptop. My laptop, as is usual for laptops, pushes
hardware compatibility issues. It uses and indeed requires the use of
shared IRQs, and has lots of weird hardware (and a buggy BIOS, thanks
Dell).

Anyway, the problem at hand is that I can't boot the hurd. My copy stops
booting after the floppy driver is loaded. The kernel does still trap
the "key-press-during-startup" bug though, which makes me think that
something odd is going on.

Also, the floppy support is loaded even if I have the second battery
instead of the actual floppy. This may be a feature; Dell might fake a
floppy so I can hot swap the battery and floppy.

I know that IRQ 10 is being shared (by about 5 devices), but a fellow
Hurd'r tells me that his laptop uses shared IRQs with no problems, so
I'm not sure that that is the problem.

Is there any way to get a log of the startup information? Obviously it
can't be written to the filesystem until the filesystem is loaded...

So, is there an easy solution to my problem, or should I start learning
about shared IRQs and write it (a dubious solution) ?

Thanks for the help,
Casey Jaymes

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