Geek Break
This isn’t really of great interest to most people, but I wanted to write it down just so I would remember, and also just in case it might help someone else in the future.
I just did a major version upgrade of FreeBSD on my home machine. And the printer no longer worked. It’s an old Laserwriter on the parallel port, and when I tried to print to it, the jobs just stuck in the queue and the printer blinked like it was getting data, but nothing ever came out. I also noticed the following message in the system log:
May 3 22:47:43 moe kernel: Interrupt storm detected on “irq7: lpt0″; throttling interrupt source
I did some searching in with the Great Oracle (a.k.a. Google) and found this:
This contained the answer. I had to edit /boot/device.hints and insert this line:
hint.ppc.0.flags=”0×20″
And voilá! Now it works.
